Assessment of ecosystem productivity damage due to land use

Piyanon Kaenchan; Jeroen Guinée; Shabbir H Gheewala

doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2017.10.096

Assessment of ecosystem productivity damage due to land use

Sci Total Environ. 2018 Apr 15:621:1320-1329. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2017.10.096. Epub 2017 Oct 19.

Authors

Piyanon Kaenchan¹, Jeroen Guinée², Shabbir H Gheewala³

Affiliations

¹ The Joint Graduate School of Energy and Environment, King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi, Thailand; Centre of Excellence on Energy Technology and Environment, PERDO, Bangkok, Thailand.
² Institute of Environmental Sciences, Leiden University, The Netherlands.
³ The Joint Graduate School of Energy and Environment, King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi, Thailand; Centre of Excellence on Energy Technology and Environment, PERDO, Bangkok, Thailand. Electronic address: shabbir_g@jgsee.kmutt.ac.th.

PMID: 29055582
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2017.10.096

Abstract

Land use can affect ecosystems on land and their services. Because land use has mainly local effects, damage to ecosystem productivity due to land use should be modelled spatially dependent. Unfortunately, even though land use of impacts are particular importance for countries whose economies are highly agriculture-based, ecosystem productivity damage due to land use has not yet been assessed in Thailand so far. This study presents the method for assessing the damage to ecosystem productivity due to land use (land occupation and land transformation) in Thailand. Ecosystem productivity damage is expressed through net primary production (NPP). To convert the damage into monetary units, this study performs an economic valuation of NPP using the production function approach. The results show that the value of marginal product of NPP is around 10-15 Thai baht (THB) (1 USD≈36 THB), per tonne dry weight biomass. The results are applied to the case of biodiesel production. The method presented in this paper could be a guideline for future land use impact assessment research. In addition, converting the NPP damage results into monetary units facilitates integration of impact assessment and economic analysis results for supporting decision support tools such as cost benefit analysis.

Keywords: Impact assessment; Land use; Net primary production; Production function; Valuation.