A1. Finding future pathways for sustainable agricultural landscapes in Europe: concepts and empirical evidence in different European contexts
Vasco Diogo (Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL), vasco.diogo@wsl.ch
Felix Herzog (Agroscope)
Teresa Pinto-Correia (MED-Universidade de Évora)
Peter Verburg (VU Amsterdam)
Summary
The symposium aims to provide a platform for exchanging with researchers that are currently working on projects aiming to identify future pathways for sustainable agricultural landscapes in the European context. This may include different perspectives and concepts such as sustainable intensification, precision agriculture, agroforestry, High Nature Value (HNV) farming, organic farming, sustainable water use in agriculture, and climate-smart agriculture. Participants are invited to present study designs, methods and results from their projects.
Description
In the coming decades, agricultural development in Europe is expected to face a multitude of complex sustainability challenges. Firstly, climate change is likely to affect crop yields and water availability, and consequently, the economic viability of agricultural systems. In addition, there is a strong pressure to keep improving production efficiency in order to remain competitive in the increasingly globalised commodity markets and to ensure a sufficient supply of food for a growing world population. At the same time, there is also an increasing awareness that current intensive agricultural practices significantly contribute to severe socio-ecological impacts, including biodiversity loss and the degradation of important ecosystem services. As a result of these challenges, divergent trajectories are currently observed across Europe: scale enlargement and further intensification of production in some areas, replacement of conventional agriculture by less intensive production systems in others, or farmland abandonment in remote low-fertility areas.
Several alternative concepts and approaches has been proposed to reconcile the need to achieve food security with the requirements for minimising the environmental impacts of agriculture. Such pathways include, for example, sustainable intensification, agroforestry, High Nature Value farming, organic farming, sustainable water use in agriculture, and climate-smart agriculture. These approaches have been recently receiving the attention from the policy arena as solutions for sustainable food production, as evidenced in the EU’s Farm-to-Fork Strategy. Finding the solutions that can best address these challenges is, however, highly site-specific, depending on the local characteristics of the production systems and their political, economic and socio-cultural contexts. Trade-offs beyond the farm-level may also emerge, such as broader impacts on landscapes’ functions and cultural value, and displacement of production. Landscape ecology can contribute to better understand and assess the multi-scale benefits and impacts of alternative pathways, while taking into account the heterogeneity of different contexts. Recent research has been focussing on identifying alternative pathways for sustainable agricultural landscapes in Europe, as well as assessing their potential sustainability trade-offs, and finding what triggers and incentives may be required to achieve these pathways.
The objective of this symposium is to synthesise current landscape ecology perspectives of sustainability pathways in the context of European agriculture. The following questions will be addressed:
- What are potential alternative development pathways of sustainable agriculture in different European landscapes?
- What broader trends affecting agriculture (e.g. societal preferences, climate change, technology development) need to be accounted for while envisioning such pathways?
- What trade-offs may emerge from these pathways?
- What incentives may be required to enable their operationalisation?
Impact
Joint review paper synthesising current perspectives on how to achieve pathways for sustainable agriculture in different European landscapes, based on the symposium contributions.