The concept of multifunctional land use helps merging those two focuses by emphasising on the rule that economic action is per se accompanied by ecological utility: commodity outputs (CO, e.g., yields) are paid for on the market, but non-commodity outputs (NCO, e.g., landscape aesthetics) so far are public goods with no markets.
In the case of habitat quality, the functional relationships either could be included in the objective function, resulting in perhaps a multiobjective problem, or they could stand alone, leaving ecological and commodity production goals to be represented by constraints (minimum or maximum levels of achievement).
Strong EU laws could reduce the ecological footprint of commodities such as soy, palm oil and beef, which drive deforestation in the Amazon, according to Greenpeace.
These findings have important implications regarding the ecological intensification of commodity grain cropping systems, which can be implemented by proactive farmers in the short-term in various regions of the world.
Ecological analyses based on commodity disappearance data are consistent with these findings.
Applying the principles of the market economy of trade in commodities to the ecological and social world of our living and precious water resources is similarly inappropriate.
The expansion of a commodity frontier involves ecological changes and demands access to natural resources along different processes of the commodity chain - from extraction (here we use the term extraction frontier to refer to the space where the crop cultivation takes place) to disposal - that may result in severe socio-environmental impacts in specific sites at the local level.
Over the past 20 years, the multifunctionality of tropical mountain rural landscapes has been encouraged to enhance the provision of numerous commodities, as well as ecological and cultural services.
In a recent paper in this journal, Suh [Suh, S., 2004. Functions, commodities and environmental impacts in an ecological-economic model. Ecological Economics 40 (4), 451-467.] presented a model combining life cycle assessment (LCA) with input output analysis (IOA); termed "integrated hybrid LC A.
Payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs are one prominent strategy to address economic externalities of resource extraction and commodity production, improving both social and ecological outcomes.
