Agricultural diversification across spatial levels – A contribution to resilience and sustainability?

Abstract

Decades of efficiency-oriented agricultural intensification have raised sustainability and resilience concerns. Diversification aims to address these issues but varies across time, space and system levels, which hinders an assessment of success of diversification and makes transfer to other regions difficult. We classified diversification measures from field to landscape through a systematic review of 142 papers on intensive agricultural systems in temperate climates. Most measures were at field and farm levels, with fewer at landscape level. Since biodiversity requires provision and maintenance at the landscape level rather than just at the field or farm level, the limited emphasis on landscape-level diversification measures highlights a significant knowledge gap. We further analyzed the impact of diversification on sustainability (integration of environmental, economic, social targets) and resilience capacities (robustness, adaptation, transformation). We show that specific diversification levels were linked to specific sustainability targets and resilience capacities. Environmental aspects are mainly addressed at the field level, economic aspects at the farm level, and social aspects, which are less frequently addressed, are also primarily tackled at the farm level. Resilience is often equated with robustness towards economic (farm) stability. Adaptation relates to climate change and economic instability, while transformation, though rarely addressed directly, emphasizes societal change. Our findings suggest that the concepts of resilience and sustainability are interconnected: resilience can be understood as a property of a system, while sustainability is the overarching target. In literature, transformation relates to societal changes for better integrating social, economic and environmental targets. In contrast, robustness and adaptation address environmental or economic aspects with less linkage to integration of sustainability as a whole. While agricultural diversification is often associated with improved resilience and sustainability, most studies on diversification remain vague about the causal linkage to those concepts. Literature on diversification often focuses only on individual aspects of sustainability or resilience, which undermines both concepts, as it is the holistic consideration of all aspects together that makes a system sustainable or resilient. Our research highlights that diversification at all spatial levels is necessary to achieve resilient and sustainable systems, as each level of diversification addresses distinct sustainability goals or resilience capacities.