Greening the gray: Evidence-based green infrastructure

Abstract

Biodiverse pastoral farm systems have been offered as promising alternatives to intensive productivist systems associated with unacceptable environmental impacts, low biodiversity, animal welfare, and high risks to farmers’ social license to farm. Biodiverse systems are associated with reduced environmentally degrading exogenous inputs, and enhanced ecosystem services derived from more intensive biophysical interactions relative to productivist systems (Duru et al. 2015a). There is considerable scientific foundation in support of its benefits, including improved soil fertility, productivity, and resilience to change (e.g. Bellon and Hemptinne 2012), reduced use of herbicides (e.g. MacLeod et al, 2004), improved animal welfare (e.g. Gregorini et al., 2017), and improved aesthetics, images of clean green farming, and reduced risk of increased regulation (e.g. McWilliam et al., 2017; McWilliam and Balzarova, 2017). Despite this scientific support, there is a paucity of practical applications (Duru et al. 2015b). There is a high degree of uncertainty surrounding interactions between biodiversity farming practices, ecosystem services and processes, and biodiverse systems are site-specific in terms of ecosystem service delivery (Duru et al. 2015b). Rather than tinkering around the edges of conventional productivist systems, they require significant system redesign (Hill 1998; Duru et al. 2015a). While the landscape design process is widely known to serve as a basis for improving the impact of landscape science among stakeholders (Nassauer and Opdam 2008), there are different design methodologies being promoted, including a participatory methodology for encouraging the transition to biodiverse farming (e.g. Duru et al. 2015a), which tends to be complex and time consuming. This paper reviews and evaluates possible design methodologies for exploring and evaluating biodiverse New Zealand pastoral farm system alternatives to productivist systems in support of stakeholder decision making and improved implementation