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

Stakeholder engagement

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:

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:

Project Information
Project Type: 
Active Project
SEFARI – Scottish Environment, Food and Agriculture Research InstitutesSEFARI is the collective of six Scottish world-leading Research Institutes working across the spectrum of environment, land, food, agriculture and communities – all topics which affect how we live our lives, in Scotland and beyond.

Research

Areas of Interest


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The James Hutton Research Institute is the result of the merger in April 2011 of MLURI and SCRI. This merger formed a new powerhouse for research into food, land use, and climate change.