Can farmers meet all the societal demands with the available natural resources?

Summary

Society expects many ecosystem services from land resources, but the supply of ecosystem services varies depending on soil and land management, while the demand varies between scales and stakeholders. For instance, policy makers seek to preserve biodiversity and to increase carbon sequestration at the national scale, while farmers are more interested in increasing yields and soil fertility at the local scale. Soils are multifunctional but have a different capacity to deliver on each of the ecosystem services. Some soils are better at providing food and feed, while other soils are better at providing carbon sequestration. This in turn determines what kind of land use would be most appropriate for that soil and therefore for society to gain the expected benefit from the land. Using two national case-studies, namely Latvia and Ireland, this thesis further develops the Functional Land Management (FLM) methodology for implementation and to provide the knowledge base for stakeholders to jointly optimise land use and land management to meet competing expectations on land.