TY - JOUR
T1 - Evaluating agricultural trade-offs in the age of sustainable development
AU - Kanter, David R.
AU - Musumba, Mark
AU - Wood, Sylvia L.R.
AU - Palm, Cheryl
AU - Antle, John
AU - Balvanera, Patricia
AU - Dale, Virginia H.
AU - Havlik, Petr
AU - Kline, Keith L.
AU - Scholes, R. J.
AU - Thornton, Philip
AU - Tittonell, Pablo
AU - Andelman, Sandy
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to gratefully acknowledge all participants of the Vital Signs Trade-offs workshop from which content and motivation for this paper emerged. We are grateful for the support of the Vital Signs grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (GATESBM OPP1023542 ), the Earth Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship Program , the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Sustainable Intensification via the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under Cooperative Agreement No. AID-OAA-L-14-00006 , and the Christensen Fund ( 2103-6712225 ) for their generous support of the lead authors. Contributions from VH Dale and KLK Kline were supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) under the Bioenergy Technologies Office . Oak Ridge National Laboratory is managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, for DOE under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 . The findings and conclusions contained within are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect positions or policies of the funders.
Funding Information:
We would like to gratefully acknowledge all participants of the Vital Signs Trade-offs workshop from which content and motivation for this paper emerged. We are grateful for the support of the Vital Signs grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (GATESBM OPP1023542), the Earth Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Sustainable Intensification via the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under Cooperative Agreement No. AID-OAA-L-14-00006, and the Christensen Fund (2103-6712225) for their generous support of the lead authors. Contributions from VH Dale and KLK Kline were supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) under the Bioenergy Technologies Office. Oak Ridge National Laboratory is managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, for DOE under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725. The findings and conclusions contained within are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect positions or policies of the funders.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2018/6
Y1 - 2018/6
N2 - A vibrant, resilient and productive agricultural sector is fundamental to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Bringing about such a transformation requires optimizing a range of agronomic, environmental and socioeconomic outcomes from agricultural systems – from crop yields, to biodiversity, to human nutrition. However, these outcomes are not independent of each other – they interact in both positive and negative ways, creating the potential for synergies and trade-offs. Consequently, transforming the agricultural sector for the age of sustainable development requires tracking these interactions, assessing if objectives are being achieved and allowing for adaptive management within the diverse agricultural systems that make up global agriculture. This paper reviews the field of agricultural trade-off analysis, which has emerged to better understand these interactions – from field to farm, region to continent. Taking a “cradle-to-grave” approach, we distill agricultural trade-off analysis into four steps: 1) characterizing the decision setting and identifying the context-specific indicators needed to assess agricultural sustainability, 2) selecting the methods for generating indicator values across different scales, 3) deciding on the means of evaluating and communicating the trade-off options with stakeholders and decision-makers, and 4) improving uptake of trade-off analysis outputs by decision-makers. Given the breadth of the Sustainable Development Goals and the importance of agriculture to many of them, we assess notions of human well-being beyond income or direct health concerns (e.g. related to gender, equality, nutrition), as well as diverse environmental indicators ranging from soil health to biodiversity to climate forcing. Looking forward, areas of future work include integrating the four steps into a single modeling platform and connecting tools across scales and disciplines to facilitate trade-off analysis. Likewise, enhancing the policy relevance of agricultural trade-off analysis requires improving scientist-stakeholder engagement in the research process. Only then can this field proactively address trade-off issues that are integral to sustainably intensifying local and global agriculture – a critical step toward successfully implementing the Sustainable Development Goals.
AB - A vibrant, resilient and productive agricultural sector is fundamental to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Bringing about such a transformation requires optimizing a range of agronomic, environmental and socioeconomic outcomes from agricultural systems – from crop yields, to biodiversity, to human nutrition. However, these outcomes are not independent of each other – they interact in both positive and negative ways, creating the potential for synergies and trade-offs. Consequently, transforming the agricultural sector for the age of sustainable development requires tracking these interactions, assessing if objectives are being achieved and allowing for adaptive management within the diverse agricultural systems that make up global agriculture. This paper reviews the field of agricultural trade-off analysis, which has emerged to better understand these interactions – from field to farm, region to continent. Taking a “cradle-to-grave” approach, we distill agricultural trade-off analysis into four steps: 1) characterizing the decision setting and identifying the context-specific indicators needed to assess agricultural sustainability, 2) selecting the methods for generating indicator values across different scales, 3) deciding on the means of evaluating and communicating the trade-off options with stakeholders and decision-makers, and 4) improving uptake of trade-off analysis outputs by decision-makers. Given the breadth of the Sustainable Development Goals and the importance of agriculture to many of them, we assess notions of human well-being beyond income or direct health concerns (e.g. related to gender, equality, nutrition), as well as diverse environmental indicators ranging from soil health to biodiversity to climate forcing. Looking forward, areas of future work include integrating the four steps into a single modeling platform and connecting tools across scales and disciplines to facilitate trade-off analysis. Likewise, enhancing the policy relevance of agricultural trade-off analysis requires improving scientist-stakeholder engagement in the research process. Only then can this field proactively address trade-off issues that are integral to sustainably intensifying local and global agriculture – a critical step toward successfully implementing the Sustainable Development Goals.
KW - Agriculture
KW - Stakeholder engagement
KW - Sustainable development
KW - Trade-off analysis
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U2 - 10.1016/j.agsy.2016.09.010
DO - 10.1016/j.agsy.2016.09.010
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:85001840584
SN - 0308-521X
VL - 163
SP - 73
EP - 88
JO - Agricultural Systems
JF - Agricultural Systems
ER -