Conservation Agriculture and Ecosystem Services: Potential, Contribution and Approaches Chaudhari S.K.1, Biswas A.K.2*, Hati K.M.2, Jha Pramod2, Somasundaram J.2, Viswakarma A.K.2, Singh R.K.2, Chaudhary R.S.2, Nanda P.2, Patra A.K.2 1Deputy Director General (NRM), Indian Council of Agricultural Research, New Delhi 2ICAR-Indian Institute of Soil Science, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh 3Indian Institute of Water Management, Bhubaneswar, Odisha *Corresponding author, Email: abk.iiss.bpl@gmail.com
Online published on 22 March, 2022. Abstract Agriculture is one of the key sources of ecosystem services (ES) by provisioning food, fuel and fiber that are essential to sustain life on earth, and also a recipient of ES. With growing global population, pressure on agriculture to provide food, feed, fiber and fuel has increased many folds which necessitated farmers to intensify production practices. Intensification can disrupt many of the regulating and supporting ES, including nutrient cycling, climate regulation, regulation of water quality and quantity, pollination services, pest control, etc. There is an urgent need to balance the provisioning services to provide enough food to the growing population while maintaining healthy ecosystems and vibrant habitats. Conservation agriculture (CA) can act as an alternative system to improve ES and sustain high productivity. The CA system influences several ES like provisioning, supporting, regulating and cultural services directly or indirectly. Maximization of the provisioning services from agro-ecosystems can result in tradeoffs with other ecosystem services, but thoughtful management of agro-ecosystem can substantially reduce or even eliminate these tradeoffs. Although the idea of ecosystem services has been well developed scientifically, debate continues about how to measure, monitor and place a value on many goods and services provided by the ES. There are number of economic principles which are applied for measuring the ecosystem services of conservation agriculture. Production function model, transaction cost models, hedonic, travel-cost approaches are some of the methods used in estimation of the economic benefit-cost of the ES. Thus, the eco-system service accounting under conservation agriculture would require both monetary and non-monetary approaches for estimation of benefit and cost for its wider impact. This paper highlights the effects of CA on some of the ES such as climate regulation as related to soil carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions and the provision function of maintaining high productivity and regulation of water and nutrients through modification of several soil properties and processes. Top Key words: Conservation agriculture, ecosystem, ecosystem services, monetization, climate regulation, ES accounting. Top |