|
Policies not directly related to land use have ancillary, but important,
effects on land use and wildlife.
Regional Environmental Management
Ecosystem management measures, such as those intended to improve
water quantity and quality, affect land use both directly—through
restrictions on land allocations and practices—and indirectly
through changes in input supply, production costs, and returns to
land.
Agriculture has a central role in ecosystem management initiatives,
because of its extensive use of land and water and its important
habitat amenities. Regional initiatives to manage aquatic ecosystems,
with potentially wide-reaching land use implications, include:
The Florida Everglades watershed is widely acclaimed as one of
the world's most productive wetland/estuarine ecosystems. However,
decades of land development and water-routing have seriously degraded
native wildlife communities, and threaten the long-term sustainability
of local economies dependant on tourism, fishing, and adequate freshwater
supplies.
Efforts are underway to restore the integrity of natural systems
by recreating, to the extent possible, essential functions of the
predevelopment regional hydrology. To achieve this, changes in land
use patterns will be necessary. Acquisition of agricultural lands
and adoption of improved nutrient and water management practices
are underway to enhance water-retention capacity and minimize harmful
runoff. Guiding urban growth is also regarded as essential for minimizing
impacts on environmentally sensitive areas. (See Restoring the
Everglades: Challenges for Agriculture.)
In the Pacific Northwest, salmon
stocks have declined dramatically in recent decades due to hydropower
dam construction, irrigation development, overharvesting, and other
factors. Recovery plans are being developed to restore the salmon
population and protect those salmon runs at risk of extinction.
Recovery measures are likely to influence land use patterns across
the Northwest. Agricultural impacts—including restrictions
on irrigation withdrawals to augment instream flows, increases
in electricity rates due to modified river management
regimes, and higher barge transportation costs with reservoir
drawdown—may alter land allocations to crop production.
Logging and livestock grazing activities may be restricted
in upland forest areas near watersheds where salmon spawn.
Recovery measures may also address the scale and design
of urban growth areas adjacent to spawning streams. (See
Salmon Recovery in the Pacific
Northwest: Agricultural and Other Economic Effects, order AER-727).
Private Decisions
Private economic incentives affect the relationship between farmers'
land allocation decisions, its impacts on wildlife, and how society
values these impacts.
Farmers allocate land and water resources among commodity production,
undisturbed habitat, and development to maximize the present value
of net farm income over some period of time.
For a given parcel, each land-use decision implies a different
set of land-use activities and management choices that, in turn,
imply a different set of wildlife impacts. These wildlife impacts
are variously valued by society, which ultimately regards each land
use effect on wildlife as a cost or a benefit.
In general, society rates wildlife benefits highest when land is
undisturbed and lowest when land is developed. Agricultural production
is an intermediate.
Private landowners have several land-use options to protect wildlife
resources associated with agricultural lands. Conditions for wildlife
will be maintained or improved when:
- Existing habitat is maintained
- Cropland or pasture is restored to habitat
- Existing cropland or pasture is not developed.
Recognizing that cropland and pasture provide at least some wildlife
benefits is important because the cost of keeping land in production
can be significantly less than the cost of restoring it to undisturbed
habitat. This is particularly true where residential, commercial,
and recreational demands increase the opportunity cost of land in
agriculture and natural habitat.
Wiebe et al. (1996) note that in Lancaster
County, Pennsylvania, urban growth has driven farmland prices as
high as $12,000 an acre. A landowner who wanted to restore land
for habitat would forgo potential profits from selling the land
for development. However, the Lancaster Farmland Trust has purchased
the development rights to some 16,900 acres of farmland for about
$2,000 per acre. The land is still farmed, but does provide some
wildlife habitat.
In designing a program to protect wildlife resources in this area
then, a key economic question is whether 6 acres of farmland produce
more or fewer wildlife goods and services than 1 acre of undisturbed
habitat. While natural habitat may be the land use associated with
the most wildlife benefits, cropland or pasture may yield the most
wildlife benefits per conservation dollar spent.
There are conditions under which allocating land to natural habitat
may be economically rational. For example, almost 28 percent of
Texas farmland (about 36.3 million acres) is leased for recreational
hunting. In a survey of these farms, nearly 70 percent of the respondents
indicated that they offered lease hunting to increase farm income.
A landowner may also allocate land to natural habitat by enrolling
in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP)
or the Wetland Reserve Program (WRP).
Or, some land may be subject to Swampbuster
or conservation compliance provisions, and thus not be convertible.
When the economic inducement is removed, because the CRP contract
expires or government payments cease, the economic incentive for
protecting privately owned grasslands or wetlands disappears. Heimlich
et al. (1998) estimate that phasing out Swampbuster could result
in conversion of 5.8 to 13.2 million acres of privately owned wetlands
to agricultural production.
Tradeoffs Abound
Management of agriculture land affects wildlife at both the intensive
and extensive margins of production.
- Intensification increases the use of variable inputs per unit
of land, resulting in more production and generally less wildlife.
- Extensification brings new lands into production, but may decrease
the intensity of production on each acre.
For a given tract of land, these processes are associated with
different sets of wildlife impacts. For example, of 663 plant and
animal species recently listed by the Federal Government as threatened or endangered with extinction:
- 272 were listed, at least in part, due to agricultural development
that increased the amount of agricultural land at the expense
of natural habitat (an extensive margin activity)
- 115 species were listed, in part, because of the use of fertilizers
and/or pesticides, increasing production on the intensive margin.
The relationship between intensive and extensive margin activities
can complicate the design of policies to protect wildlife on agricultural
lands because land and variable inputs are often substitutes in
farm production.
When producers respond favorably to incentives to allocate more
land and water to wildlife, they may also use more chemicals and/or
field operations on land remaining in production. In such cases,
efforts to increase habitat for some species at the extensive margin
may come at the cost of harming other species at the intensive margin.
We generally assume that land and water use decisions
in the farm sector are driven by profit. In a free market, farmers
will generally have little economic incentive to protect wildlife
because the benefits of protecting wildlife resources cannot be
captured in the market, accruing in small increments across a large
number of individuals, the wildlife "users".
Even when the aggregate benefits associated with wildlife
resources are significant, farmers typically have very limited opportunities
to capture their value. The costs of protecting wildlife resources,
however, while often small in the aggregate, frequently fall heavily
on specific landowners whose production activities happen to coincide
with key habitat areas. For farmers, then, the benefits of supplying
wildlife habitat typically do not increase farm profits, while the
costs significantly reduce farm profits.
To
illustrate, consider the reintroduction of grey wolves into Yellowstone National
Park. The annual benefits associated with a successful reintroduction
have been estimated at $8.3 million in existence value and $23 million
in increased visitor expenditures (U.S. Fish and Wildlife, 1994).
Existence values are distributed among all people who value the
idea of having wolves in the Park. Increased visitor expenditures
are distributed primarily among providers of tourist, recreation,
and retail goods and services in the area.
Reintroduction costs, on the other hand, include livestock losses
borne by ranchers, estimated at between $1,888 and $30,470 annually.
The profit motive also presumes that farmers will offer only those
resources whose return in commodity production or development is,
at most, equal to the value of any economic inducement offered.
Hence, payment schemes offering a single, low rate to increase wildlife
habitat on U.S. farms will tend to attract only the least profitable
agricultural lands.
Because there is no correlation between quality of land for production
and quality of land for wildlife habitat, there will be a hit-or-miss
result with respect to the quality of the habitat included. Incentives
to encourage landowners to enroll those lands with most potential
for producing desired wildlife goods and services need to match
the payment level to the productive quality of the land sought.
|
