Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Ellen MossORCiD, Professor Darren Evans
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND).
Understanding how climate change will affect agro-ecosystems and the ecosystem services they provide is a significant global challenge. Investigating this topic requires a holistic approach that can capture the complexity of agro-ecosystems and assess impacts on the physical, biological, and socio- economic aspects of the system. The Drivers-Pressures-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) framework is a problem structuring method commonly used in environmental policy and management to collate and synthesise multidisciplinary evidence. By reviewing relevant literature and policy documents, we created a DPSIR framework characterising the impacts of climate change on some key ecosystem services directly generated by farmland biodiversity, using UK agriculture as a case study. We focussed on three groups of service providers: pollinators, pest regulators and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. We used the standard DPSIR framework to establish broad-scale relationships, before developing two extensions to the initial DPSIR, which together formed a novel three-step approach. The second step allowed detailed exploration of the cause-effect relationships between different features of the agro-ecosystem, including cascading impacts on ecosystem services. This process highlighted knowledge gaps relating to the impacts of climate change on species interactions and cultural services. The third step provided a visual summary of the expected directional trends for the different features of UK agro-ecosystems, based upon current evidence. This demonstrated negative impacts on biodiversity, soil quality, crop yields and a wide variety of ecosystem services and goods, which can only be addressed effectively with targeted policies. The novel three-step DPSIR approach developed here would be useful for modelling other complex systems where management is impeded by knowledge gaps and the availability of accessible syntheses of current evidence.
Author(s): Moss ED, Evans DM, Atkins JP
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Land Use Policy
Year: 2021
Volume: 105
Online publication date: 12/03/2021
Acceptance date: 04/03/2021
Date deposited: 09/03/2021
ISSN (print): 0264-8377
Publisher: Elsevier
URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2021.105394
DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2021.105394
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric
