Land-use options for Del Plata Basin in South America: Tradeoffs analysis based on ecosystem service provision

Abstract

The Del Plata Basin is one of the largest watersheds in the world and is the epicenter of MERCOSUR activities in the Southern Cone of South America. Because of the quick expansion of agricultural activities during the 1990s, the imbalanced provision of economic and ecological services has become an issue of increasing concern in the area. In this work, we propose a policy-oriented methodological approach to harmonize land-use options and prevent potential trans-boundary problems among countries. The approach is based on the analysis of tradeoffs between various economic and ecological services that are differentially provided by trans-boundary, interconnected biomes. Data on land-use/land-cover for different biomes have been obtained from different statistical and literature sources. The value of ecosystem services in the study biomes has been obtained from the classical study by Costanza et al. (1997) [Costanza, R., d'Arge, R., de Groot, R., Farber, S., Grasso, M., Hannon, B., Limburg, K., Shahid, Naeem, O'Neill, R.V., Paruelo, J., Raskin, R.G., Sutton, P., van den Belt, M., 1997. The value of the world's ecosystem services and natural capital. Nature 387, 253-260], and profit estimations for crop and livestock production has been collected from various economic studies. The results show that the difference between biomes to supply both economic and ecological services in Del Plata Basin is enormous, and cultivation of new lands in some biomes would neither compensate nor justify the loss of irreplaceable ecological services. However, although agricultural exploitation may drastically affect the supply of ecological services in some biomes, not all of them would be equally affected. For example, due to its smaller sensitivity, the environmental cost of cultivation in the Argentine Pampas seems to be rather negligible in relation to the Pantanal or the Cerrado. Then, the functional complementation of biomes across the area through tradeoffs analysis seems to be a viable broad scale strategy to identify sustainable land-use options in Del Plata Basin.