Economic and environmental implications of alternative landscape designs in the Walnut Creek watershed of Iowa

This paper evaluates the economic and environmental impacts of three alternative landscape scenarios created by a team of landscape architects, following input from an interdisciplinary team of researchers. In the first scenario, the main objective was to increase production and profitability of commercial agriculture with environmental objectives given secondary weight. In the second scenario, water quality improvements were the main objective with secondary objectives being financial health of the agricultural sector and maintenance and restoration of biodiversity. In the third scenario, maintenance and restoration of native biodiversity was the main objective with secondary weight given to the financial health of the agricultural sector and water quality. We evaluate the degree to which the economic and environmental objectives can be achieved together or involve tradeoffs. We found that some changes in land use or agricultural practices result in environmental improvements on certain dimensions in addition to making economic sense. But most changes in land use or agricultural practice do not bring uniform environmental improvement. There may be difficult tradeoffs between different components of environmental quality in addition to tradeoffs between economic and environmental objectives.