科研之友
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摘要
Farmland ecosystems are one of the most important landscapes in the world and provide many important ecosystem services for humans. However, most methods of calculating the value of ecosystem services (VES) for these ecosystems have neglected the costs of providing these services or have only considered direct costs. As a result, they have led to the adoption of uneconomical or suboptimal land use and environmental conservation strategies. Because it is increasingly necessary to identify approaches that will produce net benefits both for humans and for the environment that supports us, it is necessary to accurately account for these costs. In this paper, we propose a method for assessing the net value of ecosystem services (NES) for farmland ecosystems, which accounts for both direct and indirect costs, and apply this approach to agriculture in China to provide an improved basis for farmland management. We found that the NES of Chinese farmland decreased from 4.2x10(12) RMB in 1952 to 3.7x10(12) RMB in 2014 (1RMB=0.1628USD), in part due to reductions in the area of agricultural land. In addition, the NES in 2014 equaled only 47.4% of the VES, and this percentage would be even lower if more costs could be quantified. Because the direct and indirect costs differ among China's regions, the magnitude of this decrease also varies regionally. To protect China's food security and ecological health, the government will need to adjust farmland management in ways that account for these regional differences to ensure that both humans and our environment benefit.
