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Sandhu, H., Wratten, S. D., Porter, J. R., Costanza, R., Pretty, J., & Reganold, J. P. (2016). Mainstreaming ecosystem services into future farming solutions. The Solutions Journal, 7(2), 40–47.
Abstract: Agriculture has made remarkable advances in fulfilling the food and nutritional requirement of expanding human numbers worldwide. There are several sustainable farming systems that contribute to overall biodiversity conservation and associated ecosystem services. Yet agricultural practices that have come to predominate since the second half of the 20th century have led to the overuse of fossil fuel-based inputs, unsustainable exploitation of natural resources, and loss of biodiversity. These outcomes also have high costs to human health and the environment. Continuing with largely energy-intense, wasteful, polluting, and unsustainable agriculture is no longer a viable option for future world food security and human well-being. There is an urgent need for forms of agricultural production that improve natural capital and ecosystem services (ES) in food systems worldwide. Mainstreaming ES into future agriculture requires protocols to replace some of the nonrenewable resources (e.g. fossil fuel-based pesticides and fertilizers) with renewable resources (ES such as biological control of insect pests or nitrogen fixation by legumes). The protocols presented here have been tested in different agricultural systems that enable farmland to simultaneously provide food and a range of ecosystem services. Recent research demonstrates that managed systems with these protocols exhibit higher economic value of ecosystem services. Thus, there is need to support the deployment of these protocols through various policy mechanisms for the long-term sustainability of agriculture.
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Bennett, E., Carpenter, S. R., Gordon, L. J., Ramankutty, N., Balvanera, P., Campbell, B., et al. (2014). Toward a more resilient agriculture. The Solutions Journal, 5(5), 65–75.
Abstract: Agriculture is a key driver of change in the Anthropocene. It is both a critical factor for human well-being and development and a major driver of environmental decline. As the human population expands to more than 9 billion by 2050, we will be compelled to find ways to adequately feed this population while simultaneously decreasing the environmental impact of agriculture, even as global change is creating new circumstances to which agriculture must respond. Many proposals to accomplish this dual goal of increasing agricultural production while reducing its environmental impact are based on increasing the efficiency of agricultural production relative to resource use and relative to unintended outcomes such as water pollution, biodiversity loss, and greenhouse gas emissions. While increasing production efficiency is almost certainly necessary, it is unlikely to be sufficient and may in some instances reduce long-term agricultural resilience, for example, by degrading soil and increasing the fragility of agriculture to pest and disease outbreaks and climate shocks. To encourage an agriculture that is both resilient and sustainable, radically new approaches to agricultural development are needed. These approaches must build on a diversity of solutions operating at nested scales, and they must maintain and enhance the adaptive and transformative capacity needed to respond to disturbances and avoid critical thresholds. Finding such approaches will require that we encourage experimentation, innovation, and learning, even if they sometimes reduce short-term production efficiency in some parts of the world.
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