Better understanding of Interactions amongst policies and land and resource management practices to address SDG and other MEA

Better understanding of how to manage trade offs between different benefits when determining degradation.

Managing land at the national and global scale requires complex trade-offs. Society has historically transformed vast areas of forest and grassland to cropland and improved pastures. Without this transformation it would be impossible to feed the worlds growing population. However, this transformation has had huge impacts on biodiversity, has released vast quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere and has had negative impacts on may other ecosystems services including the hydrological cycle. There is also a developing world, developed world aspect to these trade-offs, with much of the developed world having caused these land transformation  impacts in the distant past, and with limited current rates of transformation. However, in the developing world these transformations are more recent and their rate is in some cases escalating. Although some of the developing world land transformation is driven by local population growth, developed world demand for resources and food products such as animal protein are also a driver of developing world land transformation. New land demand for bioenergy crops, one of the mitigation strategies for reducing fossil fuel emissions, will also require extensive land transformation.

Given that all land cannot be maintained in a natural state, this raises important questions around how society makes decisions around the complex trade-offs involved when land is transformed to new uses. A simplistic solution is that the sustainable supply of the bundle of ecosystems services from the new land use should have a value that exceed that of the  bundle of   services from the untransformed land. However, determining when such trade-offs are justified is complex in practice, is often based on short term necessities, ignoring long term and potentially cumulative impacts. 

Despite the above there are also some obvious win-win situations, and these would include situations where already transformed and degraded land can be  rehabilitated to increase the value of services that it can provide, possibly offsetting the need for the transformation of other land parcels.  Graham von Maltitz and Stephen Price