Converting agricultural land to Woodlands: an ecosystem service framework for Northern Ireland to appraise the economic value of afforestation

This paper presents an ecosystem services framework that is being developed to generate evidence on the economic viability of land use change in Northern Ireland. The scenario explored is that of converting agricultural land to woodlands, a key strategy to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. This signifies the loss of food production output, the most marketable provisional ecosystem service generated by agriculture, in compensation for beneficial ecosystem services associated with afforestation such as timber production, carbon sequestration, and recreational opportunities. We describe in detail the approach followed to estimate the value of food production and then briefly mention how we obtain the monetary value of other key ecosystem services affected by the land use change. At this present stage, the practicality of the framework is limited to providing a static assessment of the net economic benefit incurred from afforestation at a coarse spatial scale. We end with a discussion on the current limitations of this work, and how we envision further developing the existing framework to provide more targeted and informed advice to land use planners in the region.