Integrated valuation of alternative land use scenarios in the agricultural ecosystem of a watershed with limited available data, in the Pampas region of Argentina

Highlights

• A merger between ecosystem-based management and the DPSIR framework is proposed.

• Integration of ecosystem services in the methodology provides thorough information.

• The SWAT model proves to be a useful tool to assess soil and water indicators.

• The inclusion of stakeholder perspectives should improve land use decision making.

• The conjoint framework DPSES plus vulnerability and resilience strengthen results.

Abstract

Historically, Argentina has been among the world leaders in the production and export of agricultural products. The country is increasingly confronted with severe conflicts that originate from trade-offs between actors involved in the agricultural sector. This work presents an integrated valuation of alternative land use scenarios in the Carcarañá River Lower Basin, offering a way to link the various value domains by involving a broad set of multidimensional indicators and stakeholder concerns. Twenty-one indicators that address all three pillars of sustainability, environmental, economic and social, are selected and quantified. Three scenarios are analyzed: the Actual scenario, dominated by industrial-scale agriculture that primarily yields soybeans, maize and wheat; a Conservation Agriculture scenario, promoting permanent soil cover by crop rotation and the implementation of untreated buffer zones around the cities; and a Short Sighted Exploitation scenario, contributing to short-term profits for agribusiness but increasing pressure on the natural resources. A decision support system is implemented in the Driver, Pressure, State, and Ecosystem Services indicator framework. The Conservation Agriculture scenario is identified as the best option by stakeholders grouped into Regulatory State, Civil Society and Consensus perspectives. A ranking change occurs when the valuation is carried out from the Private Sector point of view and the Actual scenario comes in first position. We dare to say that the methodology presented in this work is a socio-technical innovation that can contribute to the process needed to achieve broad consensus among the agribusiness actors in Argentina.

Introduction

Historically, Argentina has been among the world leaders in the production and export of agricultural products. The main reason for this is that it is richly endowed with natural resources. The country is the top exporter of soybean oil and soybean meal, while it is the third largest exporter of soybeans and corn, behind USA and Brazil (OEC, 2019). Additionally, wheat is prevalent in the domestic diet (a per capita consumption of 119 kg of bread per year). All of which means that these products are traditionally sensitive from a policy-making standpoint (Lence, 2010).

Argentina is increasingly confronted with severe conflicts that originate from trade-offs between actors involved in the agricultural sector. A key challenge is to be able to represent most of the values held by different stakeholders in a balanced decision-making process. The inclusion of socioeconomic indicators and ecosystem services (ESs) valuations into a multicriteria analysis to define land use policies is still a pending issue for interdisciplinary research programs.

Non-monetary approaches have been applied in various stages of ecosystem planning and management in farming problems. They examine preferences, needs or demands of different stakeholders towards nature, and articulate plural values through different quantitative measures other than money (Chan et al., 2012).

Following an empirically based quali-quantitative approach, Huaranca et al. (2019) studied land use change and economic development in expanding agricultural frontier in Northern Argentina. They found that actual social perspectives did not conform to a simplistic production versus conservation dichotomy, instead, a complex picture emerges when social perspectives are identified. They emphasized that the notion of multiple social perspectives can help resolve dichotomous and fictitious stalemates on environment-development challenges.

Uncovering and eliciting diverse values necessarily require integrating different valuation approaches (Jacobs et al., 2016). Integrated valuation explicitly aims at including multiple values and views in a coherent and operational framework. The choice of the types of values, the selection of social actors, the decision as to which methodological tools and measurement units to use, or even the choice of which ESs or benefits to include, are steps that determine the outcome of the assessment (Vatn, 2009). In fact, the action of valuation through stakeholder preferences beyond the mere act of estimating values has implications for the conceptualization of valuation.

Integrated valuation might be more costly in terms of the resources and data needed, but it explicitly addresses the gaps in knowledge, offering a way to articulate between different value domains by involving a broad set of multidimensional indicators and stakeholder concerns.

This work presents an integrated non-monetary valuation methodology to assess land uses in agricultural ecosystems. The conceptual framework of the Driver, Pressure, State, ESs and Response, a merger between ecosystem-based management and the Driver, Pressure, State, Impact and Response framework proposed by Kelble et al. (2013), is implemented. This model is able to capture a greater diversity of discourses, thereby providing more comprehensive information to decision makers than a traditional Driver, Pressure, State, Impact and Response model. Because the response options are analyzed by evaluating alternative land use scenarios via a decision support system, the causal structure describing the interactions between social, environmental and economic indicators is here called DPSES: Driver, Pressure, State and ESs. We consider three representative stakeholders, these being: (a) a Private Sector, embodied by 1.08% of individual farmers owning 36.4% of the arable land, who represent more than 85% of total agricultural-based exports and generates 70% of the foreign currency; (b) a Regulatory State, imposing economic policies on the farming sector, related to export restrictions and industrialization for import substitution programs; (c) a Civil Society concerned with the ecological and environmental sustainability of agricultural ecosystems, as well as with the risk to human health related to the use of pesticides, a subject that has emerged as a key problem in Argentina. A brief review of this long-lasting conflicting dispute in the country is provided as Supplementary Information (SI).

Our objectives are threefold: (i) to implement a decision support system that adopts DPSES as a reference framework for land use management; (ii) to incorporate the perspective of multiple stakeholders for promoting participation in decision making; (iii) to integrate the concepts of vulnerability and resilience with the DPSES approach.