Guide for the Sustainable Intensification Assessment Framework

Abstract

Sustainable Intensification (SI) offers a means to balance the environmental, economic, and social objectives of agriculture. Agricultural intensification may be defined as increasing output per unit input per unit time. A narrow definition of sustainable intensification is “production of more food on the same piece of land while reducing the negative environmental impacts and at the same time increasing the contributions to natural capital and flow of environmental services” (Zurek et al., 2015). The definition of SI has evolved to include non-environmental dimensions such as social issues, economics, and the human condition (Loos et al., 2014). The inclusion of social aspects helps ensure a balanced approach to the intensification process. In this guide, we present a framework of objective-oriented SI indicators organized into five domains critical for sustainability: productivity, economic, environment, human condition, and social domains. The objective-oriented indicator assessment is similar to the goal-oriented framework proposed by Olsson et al. (2009) in which objectives of the innovation are identified and then indicators are linked to the objectives to assess performance in a balanced approach across domains. The metrics for each indicator are categorized across spatial scales: field, farm, household, and landscape, so that the assessment can be used for innovations at any scale and so that cross-scale linkages can be considered (Figure 1).