432 Feeding the World and Protecting Biodiversity Historically, conservation policy has focused on increasing protected areas by keeping people apart from nature – limiting hunting, farming, grazing, and other human activities in protected areas Today, over 105,000 protected areas cover about 21 million km2, or 11%, of the world’s land surface (West et al., 2006) There is no doubt that this system of modern protected areas, begun in the nineteenth century with the national park systems of USA and great game reserves of colonial Africa, has been a critical tool for conservation Many conservation groups and international policy focus their efforts, by targeting biodiversity protection in globally important regions (e.g., Olson and Dinerstein, 1998; Myers et al., 2000) Strategies to shift dominant patterns of production and consumption, however, are also needed in a world where the growth of population, resource use, and international trade create powerful incentives to convert sensitive habitat into agriculture and intensify production on existing farmlands Monitoring and enforcement costs, as well as ethical objections to the criminalization of traditional livelihoods, make the search for alternative models all the more pressing (Karieva and Marvier, 2007) While protected areas that regulate land use directly will continue to play a role in conservation, indirect strategies will create new options for how people use the land Strategies focused solely on agricultural goals or solely focused on conservation goals will continue, but the fact is that food production and biodiversity conservation are mutual goals across a large part of the planet Increasingly, strategies are needed that support agricultural production and biodiversity conservation, promoting smarter approaches to achieving these twin goals and managing necessary trade-offs more effectively The following paragraphs provide examples of a number of potential mechanisms for change within agricultural policy and market-based approaches Agricultural Policies Policies aimed at decreasing the environmental effects of agriculture have been in place for decades In the USA, for example, the 1985 Conservation Reserve Program furthered policies begun in the 1950s to make direct payments to farmers to keep their land out of production More recently, a number of states, provinces, and countries have adopted new policies that aim to maintain some semblance of the natural flows of rivers as part of a comprehensive water management strategy These efforts improve upon earlier policies designed to maintain a minimum flow in rivers, with the intent of managing the river flows within the ecological limits of hydrologic alteration (Poff et al., 2010) Opportunities also exist for maintaining and enhancing on-farm agrobiodiversity Some farmlands house a surprising range of nonfarm species, while maintaining high levels of domesticated plant and animal diversity (Daily et al., 2001) Yet, agrobiodiversity is in decline Single-minded policies intent on increasing production have favored biodiversity-poor monocultures growing genetically homogeneous cultivars Increasing support for agrobiodiversity could resist this trend through both ex situ conservation in seed banks through organizations like the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (Global Crop Diversity Trust, 2007), as well as the in situ conservation of traditional cultivars and farming systems like the Potato Park in Peru (Argumedo, 2008) Policies to shift agricultural economic incentives offer promising means to steer land use in a way that better navigates the trade-offs between agriculture and biodiversity Currently, decisions made on what, where, and how to farm are primarily influenced by economic signals on the agricultural commodities that can be sold in markets Immediate benefits to biodiversity could be gained by eliminating public subsidies that make the market price for crops artificially high Entrenched economic and political interests, however, mean this tactic is difficult, time-consuming and, at times, at odds with the goals of social welfare and rural development Market-Based Approaches As biodiversity and ecosystem services become more measurable and transparent, there will be increasing opportunities to incorporate these values in market-based approaches – internalizing costs that historically have been considered free and external to market systems Several market-based mechanisms could facilitate this change for the agriculture sector, including payment for ecosystem services (PES) approaches, sustainability measures and certification schemes, and mitigation programs employing biodiversity offsets PES mechanisms can improve land-use and resource management in a manner that benefits service users and providers and supports conservation goals While PES programs can differ substantially, the general approach involves service users compensating service providers for practices that support provision of a defined service (Wunder et al., 2008) For example, many PES projects have been established to support improved watershed management Downstream users of water (i.e., cities and industrial users) benefit from upstream land-use management, often implemented by agricultural communities Such management practices may include erosion and sedimentation control, forest protection and management, and other steps to ensure water quality and supply This approach can benefit both parties and nature conservation, as downstream users secure service improvements and upstream providers are compensated for the opportunity costs of changes to their management practices (e.g., preventing grazing on steep slopes) The most significant PES policy related to agriculture and biodiversity currently being negotiated is a proposal for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) Initially conceived as a tool to reduce carbon emissions from tropical rainforests by transferring payments for forest conservation from developed to developing countries, the concept has evolved to recognize biodiversity, poverty reduction, and other benefits a global forest conservation policy could potentially provide To work, REDD will need to devise a system to ensure accountability, compliance, and payment mechanisms that will change incentives for deforestation on the ground Certification programs and sustainability metrics are likely to play a stronger role in the agricultural sector as consumer demand increases for information about food production, businesses increase their focus on accountability within their supply chains, and measures improve for biodiversity and