Analysis of Incentive Schemes for Biodiversity Using a Coupled Agent-Based Model of Land Use Change and Species Metacommunity Model

Analysis of Incentive Schemes for Biodiversity Using a Coupled Agent-Based Model of Land Use Change and Species Metacommunity Model

We report results from roughly 20,000 runs of a coupled agent-based model of land use change and species metacommunity model. We explored the effect of increasing government incentive to improve biodiversity, in the context of other influences on land manager decision making: aspirations, input costs, and price variability. The experiments test four kinds of policy varying along two dimensions: activity-versus-outcome-based incentive, and individual-versus-collective incentive. The results reveal critical thresholds in incentive schemes, where a sudden increase in environmental benefit occurs for a small increase in incentive. Further, the context affects the level of incentive at which tipping points occur, and the degree of effect. Variability in outcome can also change with incentive and context, and some evidence suggests that environmental benefits are not monotone increasing functions of incentives. Intuitively, if the incentive signal is large enough, land managers will farm the subsidy; and if the subsidy does not exactly match desired landscape outcomes, deterioration in environmental benefits may occur for higher incentives.