Sustainable land-use pathway ranking and selection

Abstract

The desire for refining status quo cost-benefit protocols to fully encompass econometric model uncertainty motivates the search for improved technology. Availability of unique Ethiopian highlands milk-market livestock data provides an ideal laboratory for investigation of alternative land-use pathway designs. In these contexts, we present novel methodology for ranking and selecting sustainable 'land-use pathways', arguing that the methodology is central to sustainable-land-use-policy prescriptions, providing essential innovation to assessments hitherto devoid of probabilistic foundation. Demonstrating routine implementation of Markov-Chain, Monte-Carlo procedure, ranking-and-selection enactment is widely disseminable and potentially valuable to land-use policy prescription. Application to a sample of Ethiopian-highlands, land-dependent households highlights empirical gains compared to conventional methodology. Applications and extensions that profit future land-use sustainability within the Ethiopian highlands and, also, more generally, are discussed.