 Yeah, as we know that ecosystem goods are priced in market and bought and sold throughout the human history. But ecosystem services has little attention in market and not bought and sold due to difficult in quantifying and valuing ecosystem services. At C4, we often talk about landscape approach as a solution, win-win solution to provide a production of goods and ecosystem services at landscape scale. However, most of the land use plan rarely involve or account ecosystem services due to difficulty in quantifying and mapping. And this morning, I'm going to talk about economic evaluation of ecosystem goods and services under different landscape management scenarios. This study assessed five important ecosystem goods and services under five future landscapes scenarios in southeastern Australia. The landscape chosen was highly fragmented and modified due to clearance of native vegetation in past 200 years or so. And the landscape undergone various changes from investment reconfiguration and land abandonment and now reinvestment of landscape for multiple ecosystem goods and services. Recently, there is a lot of initiatives ongoing about landscape reinvestment for sustainable farming and carbon farming initiatives. So this is an interesting opportunity to see how the recent investment works on environmental and economic outcomes. So this talk will cover three components. First is identification and definition of future landscape management scenarios in the study area. Secondly, identification and quantification and also economic valuation of important ecosystem goods and services. And finally, I talk about trade-off among ecosystem services. So let me start with how did we identify and define future land use scenarios and what they are. We discussed with various stakeholders and also reviewed the recent past land use, land cover change in study area to identify what can happen in future. So first we came with the business as usual scenario which assumes the current farming and management practices will continue for foreseeable future without significant changes. So which is a kind of likelihood scenario. And the second scenario is eco-agro-centric scenario we identified due to increasing demand of food production in Australia and also globally. The landscape will be converted for agricultural production. So there will be substantial increase in agriculture production, this scenario assumes. The third scenario was eco-centric scenario due to increasing demands in environmental products and services such as carbon sequestration, biodiversity value. There is an increasing focus on environmental planting and also production forestry in the study area. So that's what the scenario assumes. The fourth scenario is mosaic farming system which is a kind of landscape approach we talk here at C4. So mix of farming, plantation and also conservation within the landscapes. So this scenario. The final scenario was a bit pessimistic scenario, land abandonment scenario because of depopulation in rural areas and increasing uncertainty due to availability of water and changing climate. So there will be reduction in food production and local people will sale their property and the land will be abandoned which is pretty pessimistic scenario anyway. So we looked at these all scenarios and quantified five important ecosystem goods and services such as carbon sequestration, timber production, water, biodiversity and agricultural production. We quantified all ecosystem services in biophysical units such as a mega liter of water, cubic meter of timber like that and converted into dollar value using various valuation methods. So carbon, in case of carbon, we used a reforestation modeling tool that's available from Australian greenhouse gas office which provides also carbon sequestration per hectare per year and then that's converted to CO2 equivalent and then we used various pricing using Australian government's carbon pricing mechanism to calculate the total economic value of carbon. Similarly in case of timber, we used a tree stand growth model called 3PG which pulls environmental and soil data from spatial database and then it produces mean annual increment per hectare per year so that we can estimate what's the timber production per hectare and that quantity will be used to identify the economic value of timber production using various pricing at current scale. Similarly, water was used, water was estimated using water yield by various land use and land cover and then in mega liter then used current water price in Australia that is a well known water price so it was easy. In case of biodiversity, it was a bit challenging because of what is the true value of biodiversity. So we left two alternatives either using ongoing pricing, biodiversity pricing used by Australian market-based instruments. Another option was use value transfer methods. Biodiversity valued somewhere else transferred to this landscape so we didn't find the comparable value to transfer from somewhere else that's why we decided to use the biodiversity value used by Victorian bush tender mechanism that gives a biodiversity. If the landowner protects their land for conservation purpose, they are paid by the state government so that's the biodiversity value used. In case of agriculture production, it was relatively straightforward so actual agricultural production yield and associated pricing was used to estimate the returns from agriculture. So these five ecosystem goods and services were combined each other under different landscape management scenarios as I discussed before, five important scenarios. So when we looked at these ecosystem services under these scenarios, the interesting trade-off we can see. For example, in case of business as usual scenario, the most of the ecosystem services such as carbon, water, biodiversity are declining while agriculture production remains more or less same state and timber production is also more or less same. However, MoJAC farming system produced significant outcomes in terms of ecosystem services. For example, carbon, agriculture production, biodiversity and timber are enhanced while water is more or less same state. In case of eco-centric, which is environmental planting scenario I discussed before, the carbon is increased, agriculture production is declined and but other biodiversity and timber production are enhanced. So this is also somehow environmental friendly scenario. In case of agricultural production, agriculture production increase and rest of the ecosystem services are declining and land abandonment scenario produce all negative outcomes except water. We don't know what happens in the future. This is in terms of ecosystem services but when we look at dollar value, it's a different result we received because agro-centric scenario produced must dollar like more profitable in terms of economic value because at higher discount rate, it produce more profit. But if we reduce the discount rate from higher discount rate, say 10% to 5% public discount rate and the total economic value of MoJAC farming system is higher than business as usual and eco-centric scenario. So it's really the matter of what return the landowner or investor wants. So if the investor wants a higher rate of return, then agricultural or business as usual scenario produce a better outcome. But if there is some public money invested, for example, support from government or non-profit organization, in that case, mixed outcome or eco-centric scenario gives a better result. And we also found that certain ecosystem services identify and value is relatively straightforward. For example, it's obvious anyway. For example, timber production or agriculture production is relatively easy to quantify and value while biodiversity and other water was challenging. So this provides an important understanding about how the ecosystem service valuation can be different and can provide land use planner and manager to make their decision about allocation of land uses. Thank you. Thank you very much, Hemlal. Thank you, Hemlal. Before we open for questions, can I just ask where we can go look at this article that you just published? Yeah, it was published in Land Use Policy and it's available online. Okay, thank you. So now we'd like to ask if the audience would like to ask questions or make any observations about the topic. So please raise your hand. And when you ask a question, if you don't mind standing up so that you can be seen and saying who you are, that would be best. Any questions? Thanks, Lou Versho. Hemlal, I'm just curious, and maybe I missed it, but what sort of climate variability did you integrate into this to understand, you know, I mean, you get rainy years, you get dry years, you get hot years, you get cooler years. And these, of course, affect the year-to-year provision of these ecosystem services. How did you integrate some of this variability into this type of analysis? Or was it a real static analysis? Yeah, thanks, Lou. That's a really interesting question. Actually, these all, I should be telling you that this is a future landscape for 30 years. We assume the 30-year time horizon for project. And it's assuming this climate data is used for the past 150 years or so. This is assuming the past climate data. We assume that similar trend will happen in the future. So we didn't predict the future climate scenario or climate variability. We used the average climate over the past 150 years or so. Other questions? Yeah. Christine? Thank you. And thank you for this working. Oh, okay. Thanks for the very interesting talk. I was just wondering if you did this in Australia and you used various values, for instance, government payments and all for biodiversity. If you were doing this, say in Nepal, how much more difficult or easier or whatever would it be to do this kind of analysis? Thanks, Christine. That's a very valuable point. Yeah, that's true. It's very... So actually, I worked this kind of scenario of what will be, what happens, the availability of data, resource, and time. So depending on these three factors, so we can start with assessing the ecosystem services qualitative, quantitative, and monitor evaluation. So if we try to do similar assessment in Nepal, it will be really difficult because of availability of spatial data of all land use, land parcel, and also value of... Also calculation of the carbon and also biodiversity value. There is no readily available valuation tools. But having said that, there is still some other approaches. We can use more participatory mapping and valuation of participatory assessment and valuation of ecosystem services. How local people put the value of each ecosystem services. We just done this analysis in Nepal and the paper recently published in Journal of Ecosystem Services. So that's entitled Assessment of Ecosystem Services in Datapoor Region. So that's possible. So either we can use people's perception or experts' perception and we can come with some result. Anina, we're from livelihood. Yeah, you mentioned about calculating the biodiversity value. It's based on the rate paid by the state government. Can you elaborate more about the assumptions and how that was calculated and about the discount rate? Are you using the financial discount rate or economic discount rate? Thank you. Thank you. For biodiversity, we used a Victorian government's market-based instrument called Bush Tender. Bush Tender is an approach that if a landowner protects native vegetation or conserved native vegetation on their private land, they are paid a certain amount from the state government. So which is a kind of auction-based payment mechanism because the estate is buyer and there are many sellers, landowners are sellers. So they propose, landowners propose that, okay, I'm going to protect the native vegetation in certain area, this area and these are the measures. And they put the tender, okay, they ask X amount and the state government propose Y amount and they negotiate each other. So this value, we got a historical value of last 10 years or so and we used this historical value is available publicly. So as an average value of Bush Tender payments as a biodiversity. And regarding discount rate, I used a commercial discount rate of 10 percent, public discount rate of 5 percent, which is common in Australia and 1 percent of social discount rate. We looked three discount rates to estimate. I think De De Dorohadi had a question, but I'm going to ask a quick one first and that's just, can you just, can you say very briefly why it's important to attach economic values to ecosystem services? Isn't it obvious that we need them, that we need to sequester carbon, that people need water for their houses for agriculture, etc. Doesn't that have enough value in itself? Yeah, thanks, Luis. This is an ongoing debate about two important school of thoughts, whether we should value the nature or we just say this is invaluable and we can't value this. So if you don't value, if you don't measure, I would say if you can't measure, you can't manage one important and if you put the value and it gives you some kind of choice, management choice and why we're protecting the nature to policymaker and decision makers because they have to spend the public money and they need some justification why they are investing this. So that's important. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much. It is very interesting. I think it's reflected the tradeoff between the development and conservation objective and you stated that among the five scenarios, the mosaic looks the best. My question is how big is the difference between the benefits? I'm thinking about if you want, for example, if you want to promote the more by the positive, for example, how much the cost that should be compensated to achieve the, let's say, the considerable benefits. Thank you. Thank you. That's an important question. We got a actual value, all scenario under a scenario. What is the value of carbon, biodiversity, water and timber and agriculture on the paper? On top of my head, I think there is some additional payments required, at least some payments required. For example, there are two kinds of agriculture production that are being converted to environmental planting or carbon sequestration. So if we say irrigated farming, so the land with irrigation system is somewhere $70, the carbon price has to be more than $70 a ton or so, very rock price. But to compete with the dry land farming, it has to be around $50 or so. Then it can compete. But existing carbon price during the time of study was $23. That's a carbon pricing mechanism set by Australian government. But this mechanism no longer exists at the moment. Now there is a different carbon pricing mechanism called direct action, so which government put X amount on their basket and various landowner put their auction price expression of interest. I will provide the carbon in the X dollar per ton, and the government has their one pricing. And if it comes below that mark and they will buy, if not they won't buy. So that's the current status. I think we have time for one or two more questions. All right, well thank you, and we'll leave it there. Thanks so much, Dr. Himlal Baral. Very good talk today. Thank you.