The True Costs and Benefits of Miscanthus Cultivation

Agroecosystems provide numerous ecosystem services (ESs) such as provisioning, regulating, habitat and cultural services. At the same time, the management of these agroecosystems can cause various negative impacts on the environment such as the generation of greenhouse gas emissions. However, the way humans manage agroecosystems often focuses only on the production of agricultural goods, which yield monetary benefits in the short term but do not include the positive and negative external effects on ESs. In order to enable a holistic assessment of the economic and environmental costs and benefits, the current study combines the production costs, the monetary value of the ESs provided and the monetization of the environmental impacts caused by the management of agroecosystems using the perennial crop miscanthus as an example. Depending on the scenario assessed, the cultivation of miscanthus leads to a net benefit of 140 to 3051 EUR ha(-1) yr(-1). The monetary value of the ESs provided by the miscanthus cultivation thereby considerably outweighs the internal and external costs. The approach applied allows for a holistic assessment of the benefits and costs of agroecosystems and thus enables management decisions that are not only based on the biomass yield but include the various interactions with the environment.