The effects of farming systems on biodiversity and rural tourism. Deconstructing the intensification amalgam to better inform agricultural policy

Mestrado em Gestão e Conservação de Recursos Naturais / Instituto Superior de Agronomia. Universidade de Lisboa / Universidade de Évora

The time when cities merely expected that agriculture would provide them with affordable food is over. Today’s society has other needs and expectations to be met by agriculture and rural areas. Indeed, agriculture is no longer only valued for its traditional food production function but also by a series of other functions it additionally provides to modern society, e.g. environmental protection and rural consumption functions. An integrated analytical framework was developed to assess the effects that farming systems have on biodiversity – an environmental protection function dimension – and on tourism – a rural consumption function dimension. The methodology used combines farming systems (FS) and land use/land cover (LULC) variables assessed at farm and parish levels to fully characterize the production system in a closer to farmers’ way. The separation of FS into different dimensions contributes to deconstruct the conceptual amalgam that is usually called agricultural intensification into separate dimensions, related e.g. with per-hectare output or input (intensity sensu stricto), specialization level and pattern, or the labour-land ratio; and separately analyse the effect of each on biodiversity and tourism. Therefore, an analytical and more informative character is given to the notion of intensity. Although the relationship between the production system and biodiversity or tourism is verified, the effects FS/LULC variables have on biodiversity and tourism are different, being the latter much weaker. Even so, the results stress the need to focus on more than one agricultural function in an integrated way, as the maximization of a single function, i.e. food production, protection or consumption, may negatively affect the provision of the others. However, not only trade-offs but also complementarities were found between the food production function of agriculture and biodiversity: trade-offs between land productivity (intensity sensu stricto) and biodiversity; complementarities between the landscape-level share of land used as farmland and biodiversity

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