Rating Potential Land Use Taking Ecosystem Service into Account—How to Manage Trade-Offs

Rating the potential land use for crop production and/or ranching is typically a process where gains counterbalance environmental losses. Whereas are often easy to verify, losses may render visibility through changes in ecosystem service, such as water and habitat quality, carbon storage, etc., thus, leaving decision maker with multi-criteria problem. The present study demonstrates how partial-order methodology constitutes an advantageous tool rating/ranking that takes trade-offs into account. It demonstrated not only optimal choice of area, on average basis, e.g., production, disclosed, but also relative importance included indicators (production gains, losses). A short introduction given, applying data from recent Chinese looking monoculture function tradeoffs. more elaborate system esgame was used, disclosing most beneficial area ranching, well indicators’ importance. further single composite indicator obtained by simple aggregation values ranking lead result optimized; however, this comes at expense environment.