Agriculture and Ecosystem Services

Agriculture is one of the main drivers of environmental change. It is the source of many changes in land use and the origin of a broad range of pollutants. We can usefully think of the impact of agriculture on the environment, and of the interrelationship between the two, by thinking of agriculture as a producer and consumer of ecosystem services. Viewing the environment as natural capital, we see that ecosystems are capital assets, and embody production technologies that are valuable, complex, and often poorly understood. Patterns of agricultural use affect the quantity and quality of services that they deliver. Ecosystems deliver multiple types of services across widely varying spatial scales, so that patterns of agricultural use across many different scales matter. Efficient delivery of alternative environmental services or 'crops' such as carbon sequestration, water quality, and wildlife habitat requires distinctive institutional forms, and an intellectual integration of ecology into agricultural economics