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Agricultural ecosystems produce food, fiber, and nonmarketed ecosystem services (ES). Agriculture also typically involves high negative external costs associated with, for example, fossil fuel use. We estimated, via fieldscale ecological monitoring and economic value-transfer methods, the market and nonmarket ES value of a combined food and energy (CFE) agro-ecosystem that simultaneously produces food, fodder, and bioenergy. Such novel CFE agro-ecosystems can provide a significantly increased net crop, energy, and nonmarketed ES compared with conventional agriculture, and require markedly less fossil-based inputs. Extrapolated to the European scale, the value of nonmarket ES from the CFE system exceeds current European farm subsidy payments. Such integrated food and bioenergy systems can thus provide environmental value for money for European Union farming and nonfarming communities.

Agriculture is the main source of income for rural communities in many developing countries such asIndonesia. Agriculture represents 15% of the Gross Domestic Product and employs nearly 38 millionworkers, most of whom are small farmers. Thus, improving the condition of farmers will reduce the levelof poverty. Rice Crop Insurance is one of the Government's programs to support farmers, farmers can stillimmediately replant their land from the payment of benefits paid by the Insurer and do not experiencefinancial shocks due to by unwanted events. The current pattern of agriculture in Indonesia are traditionalpattern so that natural factors are very influential, agricultural machinery and capital financial is limited.The location of the research was carried out at the Asuransi Jasindo Purwokerto Branch Office. Thisresearch is an exploratory descriptive research because this research aims to explore various problems orquestions that become the focus of a research activity. This research involves Asuransi Jasindo, farmersgroup, Unit Pelaksana Jasa Alsintan and Bank BNI as a financial institution. Learning from the experiencesof other developing countries, the success of most insurance projects lies in the combination of insurancewith other services, such as loans, in-kind seed payments, and government programs that improve soilconditions and infrastructure. So that the existence of agricultural insurance can change the behavior offarmers by reducing uncertainty, allowing farmers to get profitable crops and then becoming a catalyst,because lenders are more likely to provide credit to farmers who are protected by insurance.Keywords: Agricultural insurance; agricultural ecosystem; insurance marketing; insurance marketingstrategy

Agriculture is the main source of income for rural communities in many developing countries such asIndonesia. Agriculture represents 15% of the Gross Domestic Product and employs nearly 38 millionworkers, most of whom are small farmers. Thus, improving the condition of farmers will reduce the levelof poverty. Rice Crop Insurance is one of the Government's programs to support farmers, farmers can stillimmediately replant their land from the payment of benefits paid by the Insurer and do not experiencefinancial shocks due to by unwanted events. The current pattern of agriculture in Indonesia are traditionalpattern so that natural factors are very influential, agricultural machinery and capital financial is limited.The location of the research was carried out at the Asuransi Jasindo Purwokerto Branch Office. Thisresearch is an exploratory descriptive research because this research aims to explore various problems orquestions that become the focus of a research activity. This research involves Asuransi Jasindo, farmersgroup, Unit Pelaksana Jasa Alsintan and Bank BNI as a financial institution. Learning from the experiencesof other developing countries, the success of most insurance projects lies in the combination of insurancewith other services, such as loans, in-kind seed payments, and government programs that improve soilconditions and infrastructure. So that the existence of agricultural insurance can change the behavior offarmers by reducing uncertainty, allowing farmers to get profitable crops and then becoming a catalyst,because lenders are more likely to provide credit to farmers who are protected by insurance.Keywords: Agricultural insurance; agricultural ecosystem; insurance marketing; insurance marketingstrategy

Ecosystem services are the resources and processes supplied by natural ecosystems which benefit humankind (for example, pollination of crops by insects, or water filtration by wetlands). They underpin life on earth, provide major inputs to many economic sectors and support our lifestyles. Agricultural and urban areas are by far the largest users of ecosystems and their services and (for the first time) this book explores the role that ecosystem services play in these managed environments. The book also explores methods of evaluating ecosystem services, and discusses how these services can be maintained and enhanced in our farmlands and cities. This book will be useful to students and researchers from a variety of fields, including applied ecology, environmental economics, agriculture and forestry, and also to local and regional planners and policy makers.

Who owns the soils? What seems to be a straightforward legal issue actually opens up a debate about the ecosystem services that can be derived from soils and the distribution of benefits and responsibilities for sustaining functioning and healthy soils. In particular, agricultural land use may be constrained by a lack of properly defined property rights. Using the new institutional economics perspective, we show that multifunctionality of soils and an attribute-based property rights perspective substantiate the intuition that land property implies special obligations towards the common good. The concept of ecosystem services can illustrate the variety of beneficiaries of multifaceted soil ecosystem services. This allows identification of reasons for unsustainable soil management that result from imperfections in the definition of property rights. We suggest implications for improved governance of agricultural soils using two case studies in the EU context: the EU Common Agricultural Policy and the use of planning instruments to steer agricultural soil use in Germany. Thus, we contribute to achieving the societal goals of more sustainable land use by detecting causes of shortcomings in current land regulation and by suggesting governance approaches to support a more sustainable management of agricultural soils.

Insect pollinators, both managed and wild, have become a focus of global scientific, political and media attention because of their apparent decline and the perceived impact of this decline on crop production. Crop pollination by insects is an essential ecosystem service that increases the yield and quality of approximately 35% of crops worldwide. Pollinator declines are a consequence of multiple environmental pressures, e.g. habitat transformation and fragmentation, loss of floral resources, pesticides, pests and diseases, and climate change. Similar environmental pressures are faced in South Africa where there is a high demand for pollination services. In this paper, we synthesise data on the importance of different pollinators as a basis for services to South African crops and on the status of managed honeybees. We also focus on insect pollination services for the Western Cape deciduous fruit industry, which is worth ZAR9800 million per year and is heavily reliant on pollination services from managed honeybees. We discuss landscape and regional level floral resources needed to maintain sufficient numbers of managed honeybee colonies. In summary, the available literature shows a lack of data on diversity and abundance of crop pollinators, and a lack of long-term data to assess declines. We highlight key areas that require research in South Africa and emphasise the critical role of floral resource availability at the landscape and regional scale to sustain pollinators. We conclude that understanding the dynamics of how floral resources are used will help inform how landscapes could be better managed in order to provide long-term sustainable pollination services.

The System of Environmental-Economic Accounting - Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA) provides an integrated statistical framework which organizes spatially explicit data on environmental quality, natural capital and ecosystem services and links this information to economic activities such as agriculture. In this paper we assess how the SEEA EA can support the monitoring and evaluation of environmental objectives of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). We focus on the Netherlands, for which an elaborate set of SEEA EA accounts has been published, and the themes of nitrogen pollution and farmland biodiversity. We studied the completeness of indicators included in the accounts, their quality and analysed how the accounts could support agri-environmental reporting, agri-environmental measures effectiveness assessments, and results-based payments to farmers. As a reference we used the Driving forces – Pressures – State – Impacts - Responses (DPSIR) framework. The Dutch SEEA EA accounts only include half of the indicators which we considered essential to assess the effects of farming on natural capital and ecosystem services for the two studied environmental themes. However, most gaps in the accounts could be filled with other publicly available environmental monitoring data. Regarding N pollution, the availability and reliability of indicators at landscape and farm scales are not sufficient to support the assessment of agri-environmental measures effectiveness and results-based payments to decrease N pollution. The accounts have a higher potential to support the assessment of measures to conserve farmland biodiversity, in particular due to high resolution maps of ecosystem extent and ecosystem services flows. The potential of the SEEA EA accounts may be more limited in other countries where ecosystem accounting has only recently started. However, the SEEA EA is also implemented at the European Union scale, so that SEEA EA indicators will gradually become available for all European countries. To enhance the relevance of ...

The issue of diversification of the agricultural sector in the context of providing environmental, social and economic components is on the agenda of governments of many countries. Ecosystem services can form a powerful direction of agricultural development inculcating the sustainable development. A significant problem lies in the lack of ecosystem conservation, the lack of realization of ecosystem services, limited understanding of the nature of ecosystem services, and the lack of available statistics. Current research focuses on assessing the contribution of ecosystem services to entire cycle of a product and how it overcomes the business risks. As a result, new sources of income are foregone. That is why effective environmental management must take into account new income opportunities flowing in from various ecosystem services if conserved properly. This article is to identify possible areas for diversification of the agricultural sector in the context of ecosystem services. Some factors that determine ecosystem services are suggested. Correlation models are used to understand the relationship between ecosystem services and the agricultural productivity. Based on secondary data, the optimal directions of diversification of agricultural producers are determined. Some organizational aspects of opening new avenues in given legislation framework are identified.

Agroecosystems are vital for supplying ecosystem services to human society, but most modern farming practices impact detrimentally on the environment. Public agricultural support policies have been critically important in influencing the transformation of the farm sectors; however, few of them have been dedicated to enhancing ecosystem services beyond agricultural commodities. The largest agricultural support system worldwide, the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), has now come to a critical point, as major decisions concerning its design and implementation after 2013 are about to be taken. The debate on this reform process presents a unique opportunity to trigger a transition from commodity-based subsidy policies to policies centered on efficient provision of ecosystem services from agricultural land. To prompt such discussion, we formulate key recommendations informed by a review of ecosystem services literature and address verifiable links to human well-being, non-market valuation for balanced services provision, treatment of ecosystem services bundles, site-specific and regionalized approaches, matching spatial scales for different ecosystem services, funding permanence for payment schemes, strong monitoring and adaptive approaches to tackling uncertainties, and coherent cross-sectoral policy design. If these issues were to be considered in formulating and implementing future CAP, it might become an exemplar for redirecting agricultural policies elsewhere in the world towards sustainability.

Ecosystem services provided by semi-natural agro-ecosystems in Europe are vulnerable to land-use change. Typically, vulnerability assessments include uncertainty around the future political and economic context of land-use systems through the use of scenarios. Here, we use a novel indicator sequence to assess the acceptability of scenario impacts on ecosystem properties to social representations of ecosystem services in a case study area. The sequence can incorporate multiple sources of uncertainty, and we highlight the key role of plant dispersal in driving ecosystem service provision by comparing outcomes from different methods for projecting scenario impact on ecosystem properties. By varying which properties underly valued ecosystem services and by comparing how people could adapt their future demand for ecosystem services we also incorporate social uncertainty. We find that social representations most negatively affected by litter accumulation are the most vulnerable.

The successful adoption of digital innovations in agricultural production systems is based on the proactive participation of all stakeholders and represents an important step in establishing resilient agri-food chains and creating sustainable value. The key tool for the creation of sustainable value is integrating the nine aspects of the business process (cooperation; inclusion; financing; diversification; communication; policies; knowledge with entrepreneurship; and production) by re-using of open governmental and public endeavours data as well as by the contractual sharing. The objectives of this research are to identify stakeholders in the Croatian agricultural system, and to explore their roles and their potential for data supply and needs for data uptake. Open access repositories were queried to identify stakeholders. Direct observation methods and semi-structured conservational qualitative interviews were used for stakeholder characterisation and data flow detection. Stakeholder importance with respect to current data supply was analysed. Underdeveloped data flow relationships in the agricultural data ecosystem in Croatia could be built in a spontaneous process following the data opening of the Research and Consumer group of stakeholders and promoting data sharing initiatives of the early adopters in the Supplier group. In that way, data opening would be the driver of the effective cooperation creation required for sustainable value creation but also the adoption of the best management practices, sustainable solutions and digital development.