Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
with them for land because the latter need large areas to be profitable. Moreover,
the average water quality in the area may be good only because the two types of
farms are present and the intensive farms may need that the less-intensive ones keep
their activity despite competition (otherwise they would be forced to lower their
own pressure on water quality).
Step 2: Qualitative Assessment of Jointness
Identification of jointness, discussed above, is an important first step but as an
indicator of multifunctionality it is limited in terms of the information it presents to
stakeholders. Qualitative assessment of jointness can extend such an analysis by
providing answers to two different questions which are not addressed above:
-
Is the degree of jointness strong or weak?
-
What is the origin of jointness? Jointness can be due to: technical interdependencies
in the production process; the existence of a non-allocable production factor i.e.
when different products are obtained from a single input such as the case of wheat
and straw production or of ovine meat and wool from sheep; outputs competing for
an allocable and fixed input so that any increase in the production of one output
reduces the quantity of the fixed input available for the production of the other
product (OECD
2001a)
.
Furthermore, a contribution to qualitative assessment of jointness may result
from surveys aiming at measuring the public demand for different functions. In an
interesting work on public demand for rural landscapes, Hall et al.
(2004)
have tried
to capture information about public preferences for goods and services that are
provided by agriculture and the countryside. Rather than looking at the production
side, at the services and goods that a system offers, the authors decided to look at
the consumption side, at the goods and services that are demanded and valued by
consumers. The methods they distinguish as being mostly used to measure con-
sumer preferences consist basically of three types of survey instruments:
-
Pools and surveys conducted by conservation organisations, government depart-
ments and the EU
More rigorous surveys trying to quantify public preferences through structured
-
trade-off methods using willingness-to-pay approaches; and
Deliberative survey methods as a compromise between polls and valuation
-
methods
All three methods have their drawbacks which they suggest can possibly be (par-
tially) overcome by a combination of multicriteria analysis and choice experiments.
Interviews with specific key stakeholders could also be applied as a complement to
the other methods.
Another approach would be based on spatial analysis of the land use pattern. The
basic idea is to visualize the land cover and use of a certain territory and to associate
