Ecosystem valuation of agricultural land use change

Abstract

With the rapid pace of Urbanization, Land-use change is essential for economic and social progress however, it does not come without costs. With such rapid urbanization, there comes pressure on the land and its resources like that of food, timber production with a significant impact on the livelihood of millions of people. With the loss of agricultural land due to developmental activities, the future agriculture would be very intensive. Therefore, it is more likely with the existing pattern of allocating land uses for future development we may lose the ecosystem services and highly productive agricultural lands. The value of these ecosystem services to agriculture is enormous and often underappreciated. The study focuses on identifying underlying causes of the land-use change, ecosystem services affected due to land use change, spatial mapping of affected ecosystem services along with suggesting proposals for promoting agricultural ecosystem values in the study area using economically informed policy instruments. For study, peri-urban areas have been selected as they are enriched with fertile soils and produce goods that are highly diverse. Considering the same, the peri-urban areas of Chandigarh has been selected as Chandigarh has urbanization as 97.25%. Not only the city area, but the peri-urban areas are also expanding rapidly. It can be observed, several lower order settlements have been converted into higher order in the perurban areas of Chandigarh from year 1991 to 2011. Kharar, a census town with a potential of agro-based economy has been selected. The spatial variation using spatio-temporal analysis has been done along with analyzing the Planning legislation of the study area. The built-up area in the town is significantly increasing 6.41 sq km from 2000 to 2020, with major share of Residential areas coming up in the form of real estate. The development could be seen majorly along the transit nodes due to connectivity. Total of 70 samples have been taken of various stakeholders like farmers, cultivators, residents, real estate developer, experts from Urban local authority and development authority. The stakeholders belonged to different age groups and the gender perspectives have also taken into consideration. The two ecosystem services, Water yield and habitat quality has been selected and mapped based on stakeholders consultation. The spatial mapping of the potential area with highest and lowest ecosystem services have been mapped. It is undesirable to see the potential agricultural lands are proposed as developmental lands in the Kharar Master Plan, 2031. Examining the current situation, policy-level changes are suggested as during preparation of Kharar Master Plan agricultural perspective was not taken into consideration. A framework has been proposed to allocate the land wisely based on agriculture productivity and its ecosystem services which could be adopted in the decision-making process. This framework will not only help to promote agricultural ecosystem services in the study area but can be promoted at each city level in India.