Modeling trade-offs among ecosystem services for agriculture in the “sisal belt” of Kilosa, central Tanzania

Context: Exploring ways to maintain a biophysically functioning environment while improving human welfare based on competing stakeholder land uses is critical for sustainable development, especially under the context of a surging “global land rush”. Objectives: This research (1) integrates different stakeholders’ perceptions of human-environmental conditions and dynamics in the “sisal belt” of Kilosa, Tanzania, in terms of three alternative development visions or scenarios of land uses and covers, and (2) demonstrates the trade-offs and synergies among several ecosystem and economic outcomes at a landscape level. Methods: Two spatially explicit modeling tools, Future Land Use Simulation (FLUS) and Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Trade-offs (InVEST), are combined to assess future land-use and -cover patterns and project changes in four ecosystem services, including provisioning commodity production, under the three stakeholder-defined scenarios for the study area up to 2030. Results: Each scenario had higher commodity production values relative to the baseline conditions of 2018 but lower levels of ecosystem services addressed at the level of the Kilosa sisal belt landscape. Carbon and water services may generate synergistic effects provided specific mitigation and payment mechanisms are installed. The spatial distribution of the changes in these services is projected. Conclusions: Our approach provides an empirical-based platform to inform landscape management and planning. It provides a co-designed means to address possible futures of human-environmental conditions affecting sustainability, in this case for food production, resource use, poverty alleviation, and environmental conservation.