Ecological Intensification and Sustainable Intensification: Increasing Benefits to and Reducing Impacts on the Environment to Improve Future Agricultural and Food Systems

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Background

Increased future food demand will necessitate more global food production while reducing environmental impacts of agriculture and food systems. Agriculture can be extensive where more land is required to produce food. Intensifying food production involves increasing output of crops and livestock per unit area and/or per unit time. However, such intensification typically has negative impacts on the environment (e.g., eutrophication, pasture degradation, soil erosion, greenhouse gas emissions, beneficial insect collapse, antibiotic resistant pathogens). Two general strategies can be used to farm and produce food more sustainably with lower environmental impacts. First, Sustainable Intensification increases food production using the same or less land thus limiting natural habitat conversion to agriculture. Sustainable Intensification has been criticized for green-washing if land sparing is offset by larger environmental footprints from greater input use. Second, Ecological Intensification increases food production via more complex, integrated agricultural systems. Since these systems are more management intensive, farmer adoption and expanding farm numbers and/or scale can be limited.
Both Ecological Intensification and Sustainable Intensification present challenges increasing environmental benefits and/or reducing agricultural and food systems’ environmental impacts. Ecological Intensification or EI (e.g., silviculture, crop-livestock-forestry integration, cover cropping, pollinator and beneficial insect pasture strips, competitive exclusion microbes) typically confers agro-ecological and food safety benefits. However, these more complex systems increase producers’ opportunity costs which have limited successful adoption. Opportunity costs (OC) here are the costs of foregone food production required to learn and adopt these alternative EI systems. These higher OC reduce economic (versus accounting) profit, defined as total revenue minus variable and fixed production costs minus the OC borne by producers. Sustainable Intensification or SI (e.g., annual double or triple cropping, precision agriculture, managed pollination, integrated pest management) typically increases short-run economic profitability by increasing the efficient use of land and inputs. While SI can land spare to reduce habitat loss, it can have adverse environmental impacts resulting from the more intensive use of soil and chemical additives.
We seek solutions to reducing producers’ OC and thus increasing profitability and adoption of EI in farm and food systems. We are particularly interested in how addressing such limitations of EI can expand its adoption by new smallholders as well as how EI can be adopted at more commercial scales without compromising ecological benefits. In addition, manuscript submissions to this Research Topic can also focus on encouraging both the traditional and current definitions of SI. Traditional SI involves intensifying production of subsistence agriculture in developing nations where both crop and/or livestock yields and agro-environmental outcomes are improved. Current SI has applied this concept to modern agricultural production in more developed nations. Manuscripts submitted here should clearly document how intensification benefits exceed adverse impacts. Reducing adverse social, community, and/or environmental impacts of SI during food production can focus on any aspect of the value chain including food processing.
We welcome contributions on following topics:
• Long-term effects of Sustainable Intensification (SI) and Ecological Intensification (EI) practices on environmental and agricultural processes.
• Economic profitability and reduced opportunity costs of adopting alternative agricultural systems (e.g., longer crop rotations, diversification, crop-livestock-forestry integration).
• Incorporating multiple different soil and crop health management practices into integrated cropping systems for improvements in soil quality and crop productivity, and reductions in pests/diseases and chemical inputs.
• The role of disease-suppressive green manures and other cultural disease management practices in sustainable cropping systems.
• Carbon sequestration and carbon flow in intensively managed agroecosystems.
• Quantifying environmental trade-offs of intensification impacts with habitat conservation.
• Increasing biodiversity and conservation with growing intensity of food production.
• Use of computer models (e.g., crop modelling, system simulation) to find best plausible solutions for SI and EI agricultural systems design, assessment, and management.
• Future projections, options, policies, and indicators of sustainability in SI and EI systems.
• Encouraging farmer adoption of systems providing ecosystem services such as pollination, pest/disease control, carbon sequestration, nutrient cycling, and buffering extreme weather.
• Enhanced food safety reducing impacts on humans and the environment during processing.
• Site-specific management reducing negative environmental impacts and increasing climate resilience.
• Regenerative agricultural management adoption and its intensification consequences.
• Low-input and organic system potential while reducing costs (e.g., production, opportunity).
• Urban agriculture and ecosystem services.
• Transition pathways for Sustainable Intensification.
• How other economic, agronomic, community, or social factors interact with environmental aspects of EI and SI.

Keywords: Sustainability, Food systems, Innovation, Economics, Management

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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