Sustainable intensification of agriculture for human prosperity and global sustainability

By J. Rockström, John Williams, Gretchen Daily, A. Noble, N. Matthews, L. Gordon, Hanna Wetterstrand, Fabrice A. DeClerck, Mihir Shah, Pasquale Steduto and 6 more. Ambio, 2016

966 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There is an ongoing debate on what constitutes sustainable intensification of agriculture (SIA). In this paper, we propose that a paradigm for sustainable intensification can be defined and translated into an operational framework for agricultural development. We argue that this paradigm must now be defined—at all scales—in the context of rapidly rising global environmental changes in the Anthropocene, while focusing on eradicating poverty and hunger and contributing to human wellbeing. The criteria and approach we propose, for a paradigm shift towards sustainable intensification of agriculture, integrates the dual and interdependent goals of using sustainable practices to meet rising human needs while contributing to resilience and sustainability of landscapes, the biosphere, and the Earth system. Both of these, in turn, are required to sustain the future viability of agriculture. This paradigm shift aims at repositioning world agriculture from its current role as the world’s single largest driver of global environmental change, to becoming a key contributor of a global transition to a sustainable world within a safe operating space on Earth.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f22ec90a5196a727708963853897f39c5a99af53

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Citations in the corpus

Global urbanization and food production in direct competition for land: Leverage places to mitigate impacts on SDG2 and on the Earth System (2019, background): “For instance, approximately 25% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are sequestered in non-cultivated terrestrial ecosystems (Rockström et al., 2017).”
Climate-smart agriculture: perspectives and framings (2018, background): “Crop and farm management technology and practices, although not explicitly mentioning climate benefits (adaptation or mitigation), were similar to studies on sustainable agriculture (e.g. Franks, 2014; Reidsma et al., 2015; Rockström et al., 2016).”
Social-ecological outcomes of agricultural intensification (2018, background): “Our search returned 53 peerreviewed papers (covering 60 cases) that: (1) document outcomes of agricultural intensification, (2) report evidence of both ecosystem service and human well-being outcomes, (3) are located in low- or middle-income countries and (4) are published during the past 20 years (”
Middle-range theories of land system change (2018, background): “The discourses on “sustainable intensification”, for example, often rely insufficiently on theoretical knowledge of intensification dynamics and their spillovers and trade-offs (Loos et al., 2014; Rockström et al., 2017).”
A systematic literature review on machine learning applications for sustainable agriculture supply chain performance (2020, background): “It is therefore required to have a strategic shift from the current paradigm of enhanced agricultural productivity to agricultural sustainability (Rockström et al. 2017).”
Soil as a Basis to Create Enabling Conditions for Transitions towards Sustainable Land Management as a Key to Achieve the SDGs by 2030 (2019, background): “There is an increasing pressure on land, this calls for the use of land for different functions at the same time and for restoration of degraded land [52,53].”
Pyrogenic carbon capture and storage (2018, background): “An increase in terrestrial and marine biomass production, combined where possible with the sequestration of a significant part of its accumulated carbon, is therefore considered a CDR strategy that may be implemented most rapidly, and with the lowest risk of other geological and ecological processes”
Future demands of the poultry industry: will we meet our commitments sustainably in developed and developing economies? (2021, background): “sustainability, resulting in pressure on the environment through its demand for resources and its emission of pollutants (Rockström et al. 2017; Van Wagenberg et al. 2017).”
Perceptions of the Fourth Agricultural Revolution: What’s In, What’s Out, and What Consequences are Anticipated? (2020, background): “2019); a rapidly growing global population that is demanding more calories per day (Rockström et al. 2017; Hickey et al. 2019; Miranda et al. 2019) and environmental challenges such as climate change, soil degradation, water pollution, and biodiversity loss”