Non-Market Valuation of Agriculture, Pasture and Forest Lands affected by Public or Private Investments: Scientific Monograph

Infrastructure, energy or other large-scale public or private projects require acquisition, easement or rental of agriculture, pasture or forest land. Beside the specific country's laws and regulations, investors have to follow various benchmarks applied by funding institutions as international standards. Together, these standards are designed to assure that adverse impacts on people, their rights, livelihoods, culture and environment are avoided or at least minimized, mitigated, offset and/or compensated. For these purposes, these projects are planned in remote rural areas, were there is a lack of land market because of limited transactions. A critical issue in this this process is a fair economic valuation of agriculture, pasture or forest land using non-marked based valuation methods for compensation purposes. This scientific monograph proposes some simple yet solid methods to value agriculture, pasture or forest land which could be applicable by the local or central administration without necessarily requiring on complex methodologies requiring data which are generally not available. More importantly, such methodologies are also difficult to understand by the landowners making the public consultation process non-transparent. The methods applied have been tested with success in several large-scale projects involving acquisition, easement or rental of land parcels in different soil and climatic conditions belonging to thousands of owners. A series of template will help the valuators to integrate all the variables and standardize data presentation. It can serve as a reference to comply with land easement and acquisition strategies and aforementioned international standards, for example, the Performance Requirements of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), Performance Standards of the International Finance Corporation (IFC).