Peatlands provide habitats for many species and a variety of ecosystem services worldwide. This poses challenges for land-use planners in balancing between increasing use of peatland resources and safeguarding biodiversity and ecosystem services. In a new BIOWATER-paper, an integrated biophysical-economic modeling approach was used to investigate how alternative land-use and land-management (LULM) options jointly affect economic returns from marketed (timber, energy peat, restoration costs) and non-marketed public goods (water quality, GHG emissions, biodiversity) in a typical landscape dominated by peatlands in northern Finland.
The authors used multi-objective numeric optimization models. The considered LULM options included no action (the current state will continue), bioenergy wood harvesting, intensive forest management, restoration, and energy peat extraction with three after use options (no after use, reforestation, rewetting).
The results show strong tradeoffs between biodiversity and ecosystem services in drained peatlands. These tradeoffs indicate that compromises are unavoidable in order to obtain a multi-functional landscape which provides biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation and water protection in a cost-effective manner.
Optimal LULM depended strongly on the chosen objectives, i.e. whether marketed or non-marketed goods were preferred. For example, when the objective was carbon neutral land-use, the no-action option was mostly chosen. On the other hand, bioenergy wood harvesting was mostly chosen when the objective was to provide economic and environmental benefits at the same time.
Link to the paper in Ecological Economics: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1b2Mu3Hb%7E0MNfu
Juutinen, A., Tolvanen, A., Saarimaa, M., Ojanen, P., Sarkkola, S. et al. 2020. Cost-effective land-use options of drained peatlands– integrated biophysical-economic modeling approach, Ecological Economics, Volume 175, 2020, 106704, ISSN 0921-8009, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2020.106704.
Feature image by Anne Tolvanen.