Strategies for Land Use in Changing Scenario — A Quest for Sustainable Agriculture

The assessment of land use changes has shown a significant increase in agriculture in the past sixty years, which have affected mainly natural forestlands. The environmental impact of this replacement varied according to the ecosystem and the area. The paper has mainly dealt with the efficient delivery of alternative environmental services such as carbon sequestration, water quality, and forestry which requires distinctive institutional forms and an intellectual integration of ecology into agriculture. The strategic environmental assessment based on ecosystem services appears to be a powerful tool to prevent negative environmental costs of land use plans which can remain unnoticed under traditional environmental impact assessment techniques. The study has concluded that given the physical and biogenetic diversity in India, a strategy of diversified and regionally differentiated agriculture is desirable for improving the economy and augmenting the resources. It is a big policy challenge and opportunity; particularly in the emerging environment which regards biodiversity as nature's bounty and not as a constraint to technological progress.