The Potential Role of Sustainable Agricultural Intensification in AgroEcological Systems

Project Status: Completed (See Final Report Summary)
Type of Project: Capacity Building Award
Principal Investigator: Dr Noel Russell, University of Manchester (Email)
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Objectives

Given an ever-growing population, the global agro-ecosystem is required to deliver increasing levels of food production from a non-expanding stock of land, water and other natural resources. While this clearly implies increasing the productivity of finite resources, there are widely differing views as to how this may be achieved without degrading or destroying the bio-ecological foundations on which agricultural productivity depends. In the absence of exogenous growth in productivity arising from technical change, this implies a need to develop strategies for sustainable intensification. Such sustainability represents one possible future option for land use in a UK and European context.

The phenomenon of sustainable intensification implies an optimal trajectory for both productivity and biodiversity. We believe that we have identified its existence theoretically, using a stewardship-driven optimal control model of a highly stylised agro-ecological system. This research demonstrated the possibility of a positive relationship between agricultural inputs and biodiversity along this adjustment pathway towards equilibrium, depending on parameters of the relationship between agriculture and biodiversity, on the one hand, and decision makers’ preferences for biodiversity and biodiversity conservation on the other.

The research proposed here would, firstly, investigate an ecological basis for this phenomenon and the role of spatial heterogeneity (‘patchiness’) as support for the necessary ecological processes. Secondly, the need for a spatially articulated and/or aggregate level incentive mechanism will be explored. Thirdly, the study will consider the implications of ongoing and proposed CAP reform for incentive structures, land use and ecology and examine how the impact of these changes might be jointly modelled, including issues of data availability.

This investigation is a preliminary empirical study of three areas representing three major agro-ecosystems (upland agriculture, lowland grassland and intensive arable farming). This section of the study sets out to delineate the habitat types in each area and to determine how dynamic intensification processes might (or might not) be sustainably supported. It will establish what data are available to describe these economic and ecological processes and will explore how they might be used to construct and test alternative models of the agro-ecological systems. In the process, the extent to which additional data collection is warranted will be clarified.