Private land conservation is becoming a popular policy approach, given the constraints of increasing public protected areas, which include reduced availability of land for purchase, insufficient budgets for acquisition, and escalating management costs of small, isolated reserves. Conservation covenants represent a common policy instrument, now prominent in the United States, Canada and Australia, employed to compliment the protected area network.

Studies to assess the relationship between agriculture production and biodiversity conservation usually focus on one gradient ranging from a natural reference land cover type (typically forest) to an intensive productive land use. However, many semi-arid ecoregions such as the dry Chaco are characterized by a mosaic of different land covers, including natural grasslands and woody vegetation with different degrees of transformation, frequently aimed at meat production.

Many studies have predicted, at a national scale, the economic viability of new forestry plantings to contribute to mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions in Australia's cleared agricultural lands. Such predictions are highly uncertain given: (i) differences in site quality, management regimes and planting geometries (belt versus block configurations) result in rates of sequestration that are highly variable at regional scales and (ii) uncertainties in carbon accounting methods in future carbon markets.