Guiding sustainability by a Sustainable Agriculture Matrix

Finding sustainable ways to produce enough food for the growing global population is key for achieving various Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including zero hunger (SDG2) and clean water (SDG6). Achieving this ambitious goal and finding a reliable way to measure success is however not easy, partly because the links between farming practices and how they affect farmers livelihoods and the environment are still poorly understood. In addition, there are complex tradeoffs between the SDGs related to agriculture that also differ between geographic regions, but there are few studies or tools available to examine and understand those tradeoffs on national to global scales in order to inform strategies that will help to make the sector more sustainable in the future. To bridge this gap, the consortium established as part of this project will develop an indicator system and other products to help with the consistent and transparent measurement of agricultural sustainability and improve the accountability of countries commitment to sustainable agriculture. The consortium will serve as a platform to encourage conversations and possible coordination among stakeholders and countries, and identify the links between SDGs related to agriculture to improve the understanding of the interactions between the human and natural elements in agriculture and beyond. Last, but not least, the consortium will identify strategies that will promote sustainable agriculture and inform policies. The consortium includes members from across various disciplines, including natural- and social scientists, economists, and individuals, groups, or parties that are directly impacted by or have an interest in the agricultural sector, such as farmers, NGOs and agribusinesses, thus bringing together a wide range of expertise and experiences. These stakeholders will be involved from early in the process to ensure the development of inclusive research and communication products that will be useful to the people that need them most, rather than only engaging with them as users after the products have been developed. The participants will span six geographic regions with diverse socioeconomic and environmental profiles, which will allow them to cultivate cross-country partnerships to investigate the historical trends in agricultural sustainability on national as well as global scales. The consortium is led by Xin Zhang and David Ericson from the University of Maryland and includes researchers and stakeholders from Austria, Brazil, Morocco, South Africa, Turkey, and the USA. The Austrian research team comprises Christian Folberth (IIASA), Franz Sinabell (WIFO) and Thomas Schinko (IIASA). A series of networking and co-learning activities will maximize interactions and collaborations across the boundaries of disciplines, sectors, and nations.

Finding ways to sustainably produce enough food for the growing global population is key for achieving various Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including zero hunger (SDG2) and clean water (SDG6). A first challenge on the path towards sustainability is how to measure it, i.e., to identify what aspects matter and how they can be rated as good or poor. In this project, we took an existing set of global agricultural sustainability indicators - the Sustainable Agriculture Matrix (SAM), recently developed by a team of scientists and spanning six indicators in each of the three sustainability dimensions economic, social, and environmental - and co-evaluated this indicator system with Austrian stakeholders from various sectors ranging from farming practice across public administration to NGOs, education, and research. The co-evaluation process revealed that social themes and suitable indicators are most specific to the national context, followed by economic, and last environmental indicators. While the latter - including greenhouse gas emissions, nutrient pollution, and soil erosion among others - are apparently well applicable globally, on-farm biodiversity is highly important in an Austrian and European context but presently not included. In turn, stakeholders perceived the global social indicators as rather tailored towards middle- and low-income countries addressing for example rural poverty, undernourishment, and land tenure, while in Austria topics such as intergenerational continuity, working conditions, and education play important roles to sustain farming and rural communities. In-depth analyses of selected indicators' trajectories highlighted within the stakeholder process that the indicators' drivers and interactions are highly complex and change over time. This underpins the importance of contextual information for meaningful interpretation and to derive sound recommendations. Structural change for example, manifesting itself in decreasing farm numbers and people engaged in farming while farm and field sizes increase, is considered an important driver of environmental externalities but can also in part explain farm exit as a self-reinforcing process. Agricultural policies are a key driver in the EU but would also be important to systematically assess globally, especially in their interactions with market dynamics and environmental regulation. Meanwhile, trade can in part explain improvements in environmental outcomes nationally if production is outsourced to countries with lower environmental standards and vice versa can imply virtual imports of adverse outcomes such as deforestation. Based on the results of the co-evaluation process, we identified two options for improving the regional relevance of the global indicator system by either (I) substituting less relevant indicators or (II) introducing a second tier of regional indicators besides the global set. Overall, the transdisciplinary process highlighted the importance of involving regional stakeholders in the design of metrics for sustainable agricultural development to ensure that diverse perspectives are reflected and resulting metrics provide a common understanding.