RD 1.4.2: Identifying and understanding multiple benefits and trade-offs

Managing ecosystems to avoid exceeding national, and ultimately planetary, boundaries will inevitably involve trade-offs and synergies between different ecosystem services. Maximising one benefit (e.g. provision of food) may be traded-off against another (e.g. carbon storage), resulting in some difficult decisions, due to competing demands and pressures. These trade-offs will only be exacerbated by drivers of change.

Fulfilling societal demand for multiple benefits from land requires a change from the current focus on single assets. To achieve food, environment, energy and water security, integrated, cross-scale and spatially explicit policy options need to be developed that consider and connect multiple objectives and interests.

Aim of Research

Identifying and understanding multiple benefits and trade-offs – this work aims to have developed approaches that will support integrated decision-making to protect multiple natural assets and maximise benefits in socially acceptable ways. We will have identified and quantified impacts on, and trade-offs among, multiple ecosystem services (ESS) generated by land use and land management change across spatial scales.

This will entail:

• The identification of gaps in the current delivery of multiple benefits from the land -contact Alessandro Gimona
• The identification of opportunities to increase multiple benefits through policy and industry delivery mechanisms -contact Kirsty Blackstock
• The appraisal of policy options to deliver multiple benefits from the land -contact Alessandro Gimona

This RD will use the outputs from RD 1.4.1 Natural Asset Register and Natural Capital Accounting and provide the tools and the institutional context for RD 1.4.3’s place-based case studies.

Further information

General information on the Scottish Environment, Food and Agriculture Research Institutes (SEFARI) and the Scottish Government funded Strategic Research Portfolio can be found on the SEFARI website.
Within this, there are webpages providing summary overview information for each of the Research Deliverables (RDs) within the Strategic Programme. The page for RD 1.4.2 Identifying and understanding multiple benefits and trade-offs is available here and includes annual progress and highlights summaries, key outputs and links to case studies and key research staff.
To complement this, additional more detailed information is provided below on contacts for specific projects as well as a more extensive list of outputs.
 

Research strands and contacts:

1.4.2a: Identification of gaps in the current delivery of multiple benefits:- contact Alessandro Gimona

1.4.2b: Identification of opportunities to increase multiple benefits through policy and industry delivery mechanisms, including:

• Aligning existing and new delivery mechanisms – contact Kirsty Blackstock
• Using Monitoring & Evaluation to deliver multiple benefits– contact Kerry Waylen
• Using social innovation to deliver multiple benefits – contact Maria Nijnik
• Improving the environmental performance of supply chains- contact Ilkka Leinonen

1.4.2c: Option appraisals to demonstrate resilience of natural assets under different trajectories, including:

• Policy option appraisal for delivery of multiple benefits : - contact Alessandro Gimona
• Climate adaptation and mitigation impacts on multiple benefits: - contact Alessandro Gimona
• Assessing economic impacts of changes in Ecosystem Services – contact Dominic Moran

These projects are being delivered by multi-disciplinary teams from James Hutton Institute and Scottish Rural College, supported by BiOSS.

Outputs delivered to date:

• Gimona A et al., (2017) Indicators of Ecosystem Services in Scotland, November 2017. A webstory illustrating the state and trends in 4 provisioning, 4 regulating and 3 cultural ecosystem services, fully updated from earlier publication in 2015-16.
• Hester A, Long D and Curran J (2017) NATURE CONNECTIONS:Working together to enhance Scotland’s environment, biodiversity and resilience to climate change Workshop Report, (and Annex), 15th March 2017, Edinburgh. We held a scoping workshop at the ECCI on 15th March 2017, bringing together around 50 stakeholders from a range of agencies, research institutes and practitioner organisations across Scotland to share knowledge and help progress towards the planned National Ecological Network. Presentations from across Scotland illustrated some of the exciting and innovative work being done.
• Hester A, Blackstock K, Gimona A and Waylen K (2017) Identifying and tackling trade-offs: a progress report from Scotland, Keynote Presentation, Alternet Conference 2-5^th May 2017, Ghent Belgium
• Turnpenny J, Russel D, Waylen K and Blackstock K (2016) How Can We Better Include The Natural Environment In Decision-Making?   Summary of Findings and Actions, report from workshop held 4^th May, Edinburgh.
• Waylen, K. A., and Blackstock, K. L. (2017) Monitoring for Adaptive Management or Modernity: Lessons from recent initiatives for holistic environmental management. Environmental Policy and Governance
• Willcock, S. 2017.  Exploring Fodder Availability for Beef and Dairy Farming in the light of Future Change. Research Briefing Note
• Gimona A and Irvine J (2017) Policy Option Appraisal for delivery of multiple benefits: choosing the policy focus, working document, James Hutton Institute, Aberdeen
• Comerford, D. (2017) “Computable General Equilibrium models with Natural Capital”
• Comerford, D. (2017) “Economic analysis of the agriculture and food sectors in Scotland using augmented Input-Output analysis”
• Moran D (2017) Integrating ecosystem service flows with economy wide modelling, Internal Technical Report, Scottish Rural College, Edinburgh, 12 pp.
• Msika J, Barlagne C, Hewitt R and Nijnik M (2019) Social Innovation in Rural Areas in Scotland, report from workshop held 31st May 2018, James Hutton Institute, Aberdeen.