Land use planning for sustainable agriculture: Are environmental conflicts inevitable

The productivity of agroecosystems and their vulnerability to environmental degradation are both determined by the very same fundamental factors, processes, and constraints. These may be climatic, topographic, soil-based, or a consequence of selected land use and applied management. This commonality strongly argues for compatibility, rather than conflict, between production-driven and environmental objectives of agricultural land use. However, the increasingly intensive use of "productive lands" and ever-increasing encroachment upon "marginal lands" to meet the needs of exploding human populations have led to increasing conflicts between these sets of objectives. Even so, it is our hypothesis that the objectives are less likely to clash if certain conditions are met in the planning and management of land and natural resources for agriculture. These conditions include assuring comprehensive ex ante accounting of the likely changes in the ecosystem as a consequence of development; conducting the planning, implementation, and evaluation of land use systems at meaningful spatial and temporal scales; maximizing the match between site attributes, the planned land use, and applied management; emphasizing the increased use efficiency of externally added, production-boosting inputs; defining meaningful objective indicators and realistic thresholds for judging changes in the agroecosystem's productive capacity and impact on environmental quality; monitoring these indicators for regular ex post evaluations of project performance upon implementation; and making judicious use of available data, models, geographic information systems, and decision aids for selecting sustainable land uses and designing environmentally sound management. Multicriteria analyses allow definition of the most critical bottlenecks to sustainable land use and can lead to designing quantitative decision aids for optimizing management. Such decision aids need not be complex. Rather, systems of varying complexity are necessary for meeting the needs of various clientele and the many diverse levels of decision making.