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Daniel L. Sandars Natural Resources Management Centre,
School of Applied Science, Cranfield University
Contribution to:Foresight Land Use Futures and RELU’s workshop
on land valuation and decision making
22nd July 2009, Wallacespace, London.
Predicting farmer decision behaviour, taking a planning model beyond profit maximisation!
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Options for biodiversity on lowland arable farms
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Soils and Weather
Workable hours
Profitability (or loss)
Crop and livestock outputs
Environmental Impacts
Possible crops, yields, maturity
dates, sowing dates
Silsoe Whole Farm Model
Linear programme, important features timeliness penalties,
rotational penalties, workability per task,
uncertainty
Machines and
people
Constraints and
penalties
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Voluntary conservation behaviour
• How would free conservation education influence farmer behaviour?
• What types of policy intervention do farmers find unacceptable?
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Multi-criteria methods
Discrete choice problems Continuous choice problems
Methods Multi-criteria Decision Making, Analytic Hierarchy Process, Outranking methods, etc
Goal programming, Compromise programming, Multiple Objective programming
Features Elicits a rich picture of attributes. Formal problem structuring methods. Interactive with a few motivated decision makers
Simple view of attributes. Few examples of formal problem structuring methods. Examples of non-interactive uses
Role Mostly prescriptive solutions, but have seen AHP claim to predict the outcome of the US presidential election
Most examples prescriptive. Often cop-outs from a full economic cost profit maximisation!!
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Weight distributionattributes (metrics)
0
0.05
0.1
0.15
0.2
0.25
0.3
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
Attribute
No
rmal
ised
wei
gh
t
centroid
observed
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Lessons
• Data, models and knowledge the relate management action to outcomes are very limiting for non-monetary objectives.
• There are some serious challenges in representing highly abstract objectives, such as aesthetic attractiveness, with a set of quantifiable proxy attributes
• Computing power reduced the computational burdens of solving [well constructed] integer and non-linear models
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Recommendations
• Beware anthropocentricity or extend the planning horizon
• Be adaptive and admit that valuation is only ever partial and with incomplete knowledge. Adopt a precautionary approach
• Beware of collapsing valuation to a single number when what is required is a varied and balanced profile of ecosystem services!
• Beware that wholes maybe more important than parts
• Consider efficiency based approaches DEA and related techniques