About

Worldwide increase in human population, market’s globalisation, dietary shifts and urbanisation are increasing the pressure on natural resources and have become a high priority on the political and scientific agenda. Most of these processes lead to multiple competing demands for land. The resulting changes in land use come at a cost in the form of trade-offs between food or bioenergy production, biodiversity conservation and other ecosystem services (ESS) like clean water, erosion control or soil fertility.
Understanding and balancing these trade-offs has a high priority on the policy agenda to promote sustainability and avoid undesirable societal outcomes. The objectives of TALE are to:

• Disentangle and quantify the multifaceted links between agricultural production, biodiversity and ecosystem services in different European landscapes.
• Provide a learning environment that supports the design and evaluation of policy options, particularly regarding the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), to reconcile conflicting demands: the production of agricultural commodities and the provision of ESS and conservation of biodiversity.
• Address the effects of different land use structures and land use intensities in a set of agricultural landscapes using selected site-specific measures of biodiversity and ESS indicators.

Results

TALE identified and quantified trade-offs and synergies between food production, biodiversity and selected ecosystem services. The project developed scenarios on how future land use can look like under different policy priorities (land sharing, land sparing and balanced), provided optimal land use strategies and analysed existing policy measures to assess their effectiveness to support such strategies.

The methodological steps consisted of i) designing and implementing a systematic stakeholder integration process in all project phases, ii) developing a set of land use scenarios and land use policies and iii) developing a framework that links biophysical and statistical models with optimization algorithms. Moreover, TALE provided an online learning environment (http://tale.environmentalgeography.nl/).

Using the stakeholder-defined scenarios as model input provided information on their impact on selected ecosystem services and biodiversity. In addition, explorative modelling was carried out to explore limits but also further potential of providing several ecosystem services of a region. By analysing policy instruments and combining stakeholder integration with scenario and explorative modelling the project helps to identify priority areas for land use systems, specific areas suitable for intensification or find the best locations for environmental measures. Thus, TALE contributes to solve multi-criteria problems to support landscape multifunctionality.