ABSTRACT
Sustainable agricultural intensification (SAI) aims to balance the demand for increased yields with a range of social, economic and environmental goals for agriculture. We outline a framework for selecting and assessing indicators across five domains of SAI (productivity, economic, environmental, human condition and social). We summarize several important challenges that make it difficult to implement a system of indicators for sustainable agricultural intensification.
We focus on three main challenges:
challenges associated with mismatches in spatial and temporal scales of sustainable biogeochemical and socio-economic processes
challenges associated with dealing with indirect links among indicators, complexity and ‘disciplinary’ biases
challenges related to the diversity of values and different priorities among agricultural stakeholders.
We then highlight how our efforts have met the challenges and what further work is needed. We also provide examples of our initial efforts for implementing a participatory, iterative co-learning approach, and how indicators can help guide the process of developing innovations for SAI.