Possibilities of using the LDN concept for economic valuation of land
Economic assessment of lands is essential in the search for additional LDN indicators and measures. Since the concept of LD includes the need for economic approaches (UNCCD 1994), it is difficult to draw a coherent picture of LDN achievement only using biophysical indicators without direct economic assessments in terms of damage-profit, loss-income, dynamics of value and price, etc. (Tsvetnov et al. 2021) emphasized that a significant drawback of the LDN concept is that none of indicators, as well as the PDL indicator, include an economic interpretation. Natural capital is not monetarized, which makes it necessary to reassess degradation using an “external” methodology. In (Orr et al. 2017) the logic of integrated assessment of ecosystem services is announced as it is coming from the LDN definition, however, actually only the productivity of aboveground biomass (estimated by NDVI), is analyzed, and soil features are limited to the carbon stock. (Tsvetnov et al. 2021, Makarov et al. 2021, Makarov et al. 2021a, 2021b, 2021c, Tsvetnov et al. 2020) demonstrate on pilot sites that through soil parameters of agro-depletion (main nutrients, humus, pH) or alkalinization the damage can be monetarized and for different sites ranges from 4 to 153 thousand rubles. This calculation of damage includes not only the costs of restoring soil potential, but also the cost of inaction. It is emphasized that this method is most applicable at local level, whilst at a regional level a direct method for calculating the cost of restoring degraded territory is not effective. It is recommended then to apply formulas considering the area, rate of pollution, degradation and littering, as well as the regional economic properties and special land rates assigned by the state regulator.
The development of LDN-based economic assessment is in the early stages, since from the economic science perspective, these approaches are simplified and do not take into account the local characteristics of labor costs, agricultural markets, infrastructure costs and other indicators that affect the economic efficiency of agricultural production in addition to soil properties. The resulting cost distortions are too high, so the damage values obtained by these methods can be applied only under certain conditions. Furthermore, all of these methods also ignore the ecosystem services of lands, which greatly limits the possibilities of their application for solving sustainable development issues. The need to account soil ecosystem services as part of the “loss of profits” was demonstrated by (Tsvetnov et al. 2021).