In agriculture, so-called climate calculators are used to assess greenhouse gas emissions and to identify where measures to reduce emissions can be applied. In this work, the calculator "TEKLa" is on trial. Therefore an arable farmer and a consultant have been scientifically accompanied in the process of calculating the climate balance. By using existing operating data of the farm, the tool is closely based on agricultural practice. Insufficient information and a lack of transparency lead to some difficulties in its application. Whereas the emissions and potentials of reduction are well covered for the fertilizer management, the approach of accounting humus must be viewed critically. Potentially high emissions from the cultivation of peatlands are not recorded at all. Further, the approaches of accounting credits for the potential of humus formation of e. g. catch crops and by-products need to be questioned and improved. The CO2-footprint defined by ,,TEKLa" provides information about the climate efficiency of individual agricultural products, but not about the absolute greenhouse gas emissions of the farm. Thus, an increase in production efficiency can go hand in hand with a reduction in the CO2-footprint and an increase in the absolute emission, which means there is no climate protection effect. However, climate calculators could be an effective tool in agriculture to show the reduction potential of greenhouse gas emissions and to make their adjustment screws visible. Therefore a farm needs to be seen as a whole system.

Towards a transformative research strategy for climate-resilient agriculture in Germany

The Green Infrastructure (GI) Strategy was adopted by the European Commission in 2013, to promote the deployment of GI by integrating it into main policy areas. Despite a high level of awareness for a policy integration across sectors at the EU level, urban and peri-urban farmland (UPUF) is up to now barely considered. A systematic evidence base addressing the contributions of UPUF can support a more informed policymaking. To address this, our paper developed a first evidence synthesis, to evaluate potential of UPUF contributing to policy objectives, thereby tackling major urban challenges. Furthermore an analysis of policy documents revealed gaps on the current state of policymaking and potentials for the integration in future policies. Due to a reciprocal consideration between EU level policies and scientific knowledge this work provides information that help to further construct scientific evidence to address policy concerns while taking into account multiple perspectives. Furthermore, we discussed the implications of our findings for further UGI research and policymaking and thus hope to extend the current political debate across policy sectors.

During the last years Urban Green Infrastructure (UGI) has evolved as a research focus across Europe. UGI can be understood as a multifunctional network of different urban green spaces and elements contributing to urban benefits. Urban agriculture has gained increasing research interest in this context. While a strong focus has been made on functions and benefits of small scale activities, the question is still open, whether these findings can be up-scaled and transferred to the farmland scale. Furthermore, multifunctionality of urban and peri-urban agriculture is rarely being considered in the landscape context. This research aims to address these gaps and harnesses the question if agricultural landscapes – which in many European metropolitan regions provide significant spatial potential – can contribute to UGI as multifunctional green spaces. This work considers multifunctionality qualitatively based on stakeholder opinion, using a participatory research approach. This study provides new insights in peri-urban farmland potentials for UGI development, resulting into a strategy framework. Furthermore, it reflects on the role of the stakeholder involvement for `multifunctionality planning´. It suggests that it helps to define meaningful bundles of intertwined functions that interact on different scales, helping to deal with non-linearity of multiple functions and to better manage them simultaneously.

To safeguard the sustainable use of ecosystems and their services, early detection of potentially damaging changes in functional capabilities is needed. To support a proper ecosystem management, the analysis of an ecosystem’s vulnerability provide information on its weaknesses as well as on its capacity to recover after suffering an impact. However, the application of the vulnerability concept to ecosystems is still an emerging topic. After providing background on the vulnerability concept, we summarize existing ecosystem vulnerability research on the basis of a systematic literature review with a special focus on ecosystem type, disciplinary background, and more detailed definition of the ecosystem vulnerability components. Using the Web of Science TM Core Collection, we overviewed the literature from 1991 onwards but used the 5 years from 2011 to 2015 for an in-depth analysis, including 129 articles. We found that ecosystem vulnerability analysis has been applied most notably in conservation biology, climate change research, and ecological risk assessments, pinpointing a limited spreading across the environmental sciences. It occurred primarily within marine and freshwater ecosystems. To avoid confusion, we recommend using the unambiguous term ecosystem vulnerability rather than ecological, environmental, population, or community vulnerability. Further, common ground has been identified, on which to define the ecosystem vulnerability components exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. We propose a framework for ecosystem assessments that coherently connects the concepts of vulnerability, resilience, and adaptability as different ecosystem responses. A short outlook on the possible operationalization of the concept by ecosystem vulnerabilty indices, and a conclusion section complete the review.

This review analyzes the potential role and long-term effects of field perennial polycultures (mixtures) in agricultural systems, with the aim of reducing the trade-offs between provisioning and regulating ecosystem services. First, crop rotations are identified as a suitable tool for the assessment of the long-term effects of perennial polycultures on ecosystem services, which are not visible at the single-crop level. Second, the ability of perennial polycultures to support ecosystem services when used in crop rotations is quantified through eight agricultural ecosystem services. Legume–grass mixtures and wildflower mixtures are used as examples of perennial polycultures, and compared with silage maize as a typical crop for biomass production. Perennial polycultures enhance soil fertility, soil protection, climate regulation, pollination, pest and weed control, and landscape aesthetics compared with maize. They also score lower for biomass production compared with maize, which confirms the trade-off between provisioning and regulating ecosystem services. However, the additional positive factors provided by perennial polycultures, such as reduced costs for mineral fertilizer, pesticides, and soil tillage, and a significant preceding crop effect that increases the yields of subsequent crops, should be taken into account. However, a full assessment of agricultural ecosystem services requires a more holistic analysis that is beyond the capabilities of current frameworks.

The use of life cycle assessment (LCA) as a sustainability assessment tool for agro-bioenergy system usually has an industrial agriculture bias. Furthermore, LCA generally has often been criticized for being a decision maker tool which may not consider decision takers perceptions. They are lacking in spatial and temporal depth, and unable to assess sufficiently some environmental impact categories such as biodiversity, land use etc. and most economic and social impact categories, e.g. food security, water security, energy security. This study explored tools, methodologies and frameworks that can be deployed individually, as well as in combination with each other for bridging these methodological gaps in application to agro-bioenergy systems. Integrating agronomic options, e.g. alternative farm power, tillage, seed sowing options, fertilizer, pesticide, irrigation into the boundaries of LCAs for agro-bioenergy systems will not only provide an alternative agro-ecological perspective to previous LCAs, but will also lead to the derivation of indicators for assessment of some social and economic impact categories. Deploying life cycle thinking approaches such as energy return on energy invested-EROEI, human appropriation of net primary production-HANPP, net greenhouse gas or carbon balance-NCB, water footprint individually and in combination with each other will also lead to further derivation of indicators suitable for assessing relevant environmental, social and economic impact categories. Also, applying spatio-temporal simulation models has a potential for improving the spatial and temporal depths of LCA analysis.

In light of possible future restrictions on the use of fossil fuel, due to climate change obligations and continuous depletion of global fossil fuel reserves, the search for alternative renewable energy sources is expected to be an issue of great concern for policy stakeholders. This study assessed the feasibility of bioenergy production under relatively low-intensity conservative, eco-agricultural settings (as opposed to those produced under high-intensity, fossil fuel based industrialized agriculture). Estimates of the net energy gain (NEG) and the energy return on energy invested (EROEI) obtained from a life cycle inventory of the energy inputs and outputs involved reveal that the energy efficiency of bioenergy produced in low-intensity eco-agricultural systems could be as much as much as 448.5–488.3 GJ·ha−1 of NEG and an EROEI of 5.4–5.9 for maize ethanol production systems, and as much as 155.0–283.9 GJ·ha−1 of NEG and an EROEI of 14.7–22.4 for maize biogas production systems. This is substantially higher than for industrialized agriculture with a NEG of 2.8–52.5 GJ·ha−1 and an EROEI of 1.2–1.7 for maize ethanol production systems, as well as a NEG of 59.3–188.7 GJ·ha−1 and an EROEI of 2.2–10.2 for maize biogas production systems. Bioenergy produced in low-intensity eco-agricultural systems could therefore be an important source of energy with immense net benefits for local and regional end-users, provided a more efficient use of the co-products is ensured.

Previous life cycle assessments for agro-bioenergy production rarely considered some agronomic factors with local and regional impacts. While many studies have found the environmental and socio-economic impacts of producing bioenergy on arable land not good enough to be considered sustainable, others consider it still as one of the most effective direct emission reduction and fossil fuel replacement measures. This study improved LCA methods in order to examine the individual and combined effects of often overlooked agronomic factors (e.g. alternative farm power, seed sowing, fertilizer, tillage and irrigation options) on life-cycle energy indicators (net energy gain-NEG, energy return on energy investedEROEI), across the three major agro-climatic zones namely tropic, sub-tropic and the temperate landscapes. From this study, we found that individual as well as combined effects of agronomic factors may improve the energy productivity of arable bioenergy sources considerably in terms of the NEG (from between 6.8 and 32.9 Gjiha to between 99.5 and 246.7 Oha for maize ethanol; from between 39.0 and 118.4 Gj/ha to between 127.9 and 257.9 Ulla for maize biogas) and EROEI (from between 1.2 and 1.8 to between 2.1 and 3.0 for maize ethanol, from between 43 and 12.1 to between 15.0 and 33.9 for maize biogas). The agronomic factors considered by this study accounted for an extra 7.5-14.6 times more of NEG from maize ethanol, an extra 2.2-3.3 times more of NEG from maize biogas, an extra 1.7 to 1.8 times more of EROEI from maize ethanol, and an extra 2.8-3.5 times more of EROEI from maize biogas respectively. This therefore underscores the need to factor in local and regional agronomic factors into energy efficiency and sustainability assessments, as well as decision making processes regarding the application of energy from products of agro-bioenergy production. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Agricultural landscapes safeguard ecosystem services (ES) and biodiversity upon which human well-being depends. However, only a fraction of these services are generally considered in land management decisions, resulting in trade-offs and societally inefficient solutions. The TEEB Study (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) spearheaded the development of assessments of the economic significance of ES and biodiversity. Several national TEEB follow-ups have compiled case studies and derived targeted policy advice. By synthesizing insights from "Natural Capital Germany - TEEB DE" and focusing on rural areas, the objectives of this study were (i) to explore causes of the continued decline of ES and biodiversity, (ii) to introduce case studies exemplifying the economic significance of ES and biodiversity in land use decisions, and (iii) to synthesize key recommendations for policy, planning and management. Our findings indicate that the continued decrease of ES and biodiversity in Germany can be explained by implementation deficits within a well-established nature conservation system. Three case studies on grassland protection, the establishment of riverbank buffer zones and water-sensitive farming illustrate that an economic perspective can convey recognition of the values of ES and biodiversity. We conclude with suggestions for enhanced consideration, improved conservation and sustainable use of ES and biodiversity. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Land use—with a special focus on agriculture—is increasingly influenced by globalization and external driving forces, causing farmers to seek opportunities to develop efficient, large-scale production systems.[...]

To discriminate between the contributions of ecosystems and the human subsidies to agricultural systems, we propose using an additional terminology to bring clarification into the controversial discussion about i) ecosystems versus agrosystems and ii) ecosystem services versus agrosystem services. A literature review revealed that with the exception of some very recent publications, this has not yet been sufficiently reflected, neither within the scientific nor in the policy discussion. The question remains whether to spoil the discussion with new terms again and again. We reason that it makes sense to underpin the case-specific share of agricultural inputs to the supply of agroecosystem services and to add "agro" to the terminology. We conclude, that there is a need to promote the new terminology of agrosystem services and to strengthen the use of the already established term agroecosystem services within this context. To emphasise the production patterns behind the multiple benefits agricultural systems provide to humans (commodity and non-commodity outputs) and to guarantee a reasonable weighting of related externalities in policy processes, we suggest to introduce the term agrosystem services into the discussion on ecosystem services. Agrosystem services in this context describe the anthropogenic share of agroecosystem services' generation. Agroecosystem services include multiple provisioning, regulating and cultural services from agricultural ecosystems. The inclusion of agrosystem services might accommodate the ecology-based ecosystem services concept to the specificity of managed agricultural ecosystems and therefore could be better implemented by mostly economy-driven agricultural production systems and agricultural policy.

Land-use concepts provide decision support for the most efficient usage options according to sustainable development and multifunctionality requirements. However, developments in landscape-related, agricultural production schemes are primarily driven by economic benefits. Therefore, most agricultural land-use concepts tackle particular problems or interests and lack a systemic perspective. As a result, we discuss a conceptual model for future site-specific agricultural land-use with an inbuilt requirement for adequate experimental sites to enable monitoring systems for a new generation of ecosystem models and for new approaches to address science-stakeholder interactions. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The cultivation of plants for use as energy resources is an agricultural and industrial sector with potentially synergistic benefits related to protecting the environment and generating income. Against the background of increasing land-use changes and new agricultural approaches to the production of energy crops, we present a method for identifying future-oriented crop rotations that supports both the economic and environmental components of decision-making strategies with respect to agriculture-related policy decisions (regional mission statements). The conflicting aspects of these objectives can be addressed with the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), a multi-attribute decision-making method that was integrated here. Three models are used to generate simulations of the defined objectives over a planning period of 30 years under the current climate scenario and provide input data for the multi-attribute assessment of several crop rotations. Based on the entire evaluation process, dimensionless global priority vectors are used to indicate how well the crop rotations meet the requirements of the defined mission statement. The method is tested in a municipality in NE Germany. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

It is crucial that today’s land uses are not decoupled even further from prevailing site conditions. Quite the contrary, the site-adequate use of natural resources ought to be mandatory. This is provided for to a certain extent by the concept of multifunctionality and the exploitation of locational geological potential. Nevertheless, an appropriate course of action has yet to be taken. This can be achieved by applying an appropriate geo-based land use concept. To this end, however, from the scientific perspective alone, there has to be a new level of quality in the interaction between the various specialist disciplines to resolve the nexus problem and to achieve systemic approaches. The gap between the knowledge available in geology and the aspired land use concepts appears to be particularly large. A land use concept that pursues a systemic approach and refers to an adequate extent to geological knowledge provides options for future site-adequate land use as the basis for respective decision-makers or decision-making processes, not any longer conducted by political constraints or economic incentives only.

ABSTRACT The goal of China's sloping land conversion programme (SLCP) is to combat soil erosion and to reduce rural poverty. An ex‐ante assessment of possible SLCP impacts was conducted with a focus on rural sustainability, taking the drought‐prone region of Guyuan in Western China as an example. The Framework for Participatory Impact Assessment (FoPIA) was used to conduct two complementary impact assessments, one assessing SLCP impacts at regional level and a second one assessing alternative forest management options, to explore possible trade‐offs among the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainability. Regional stakeholders assessed the SLCP to be capable of reducing soil erosion but felt it negatively affected rural employment, and a further continuation of the Programme was advocated. Assessment of three forest management scenarios by scientists showed that an orientation towards energy forests is potentially beneficial to all three sustainability dimensions. Ecological forests had disproportionate positive impacts on environmental functions and adverse impact on the other two sustainability dimensions. Economic forests were assessed to serve primarily the economic and social sustainability dimensions, while environmental impacts were still tolerable. The FoPIA results were evaluated against the available literature on the SLCP. Overall, the assessment results appeared to be reasonable, but the results of the regional stakeholders appeared to be too optimistic compared with the more critical assessment of the scientists. The SLCP seems to have the potential to tackle soil erosion but requires integrated forest management to minimize the risk of water stress while contributing to economic and social benefits in Guyuan. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The concept of ecosystem services as developed for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) is currently the most extensive, international, scientific concept dealing with the interaction between the world's ecosystems and human well-being. The fundamental asset is seen in the relevancy of the concept at the science–policy interface. Albeit, the mainstreaming of ecosystem services into policy making requires a framework that allows the transition of the scientific concept into the rationale of policy making. We hypothesize that the procedure of policy impact assessment is a suitable venue for this transition. This brings up two questions: 1) where in the process of policy impact assessment can ecosystem services be mainstreamed? 2) How can the impact on ecosystem services properly be accounted for? In this paper we distinguish two groups of policy cases: explicit cases directly addressing ecosystem services, and implicit cases of policies that follow other purposes but may have unintended impacts on ecosystem services as a side effect. The second group covers a wide range of policies for which we set out a framework for mainstreaming of ecosystem services. The framework is exemplary designed for the instrument of ex-ante impact assessment at European policy making level. We reveal that the two concepts of the MA and of the European policy impact assessment are indeed compatible, which makes the integration of the ecosystem service concept possible. We conclude that the linkage of the scientifically validated concept of ecosystem services with the policy concept of impact assessment has the potential of improving the credibility of the latter.

The impact of land use changes on sustainable development is of increasing interest in many regions of the world. This study aimed to test the transferability of the Framework for Participatory Impact Assessment (FoPIA), which was originally developed in the European context, to developing countries, in which lack of data often prevents the use of data-driven impact assessment methods. The core aspect of FoPIA is the stakeholder-based assessment of alternative land use scenarios. Scenario impacts on regional sustainability are assessed by using a set of nine regional land use functions (LUFs), which equally cover the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainability. The cases analysed in this study include (1) the alternative spatial planning policies around the Merapi volcano and surrounding areas of Yogyakarta City, Indonesia; (2) the large-scale afforestation of agricultural areas to reduce soil erosion in Guyuan, China; (3) the expansion of soil and water conservation measures in the Oum Zessar watershed, Tunisia; (4) the agricultural intensification and the potential for organic agriculture in Bijapur, India; and (5) the land degradation and land conflicts resulting from land division and privatisation in Narok, Kenya. All five regions are characterised by population growth, partially combined with considerable economic development, environmental degradation problems and social conflicts. Implications of the regional scenario impacts as well as methodological aspects are discussed. Overall, FoPIA proved to be a useful tool for diagnosing regional human–environment interactions and for supporting the communication and social learning process among different stakeholder groups.

The field for application of biomass is rising. The demand for food and feeding stuff rises while at the same time energy, chemicals and other materials also need to be produced from biomass because of decreasing fossil resources. However, the biorefinery ideas and concepts can help to use the limited renewable raw materials more efficiently than today. With biorefineries, valuable products, such as platform chemicals, can be produced from agricultural feedstock, which can subsequently be further processed into a variety of substances by the chemical industry. Due to the role they play as producers of biomass, rural areas will grow in importance in the decades to come. Parts of the biorefinery process can be relocated to the rural areas to bring a high added value to these regions. By refining biomass at the place of production, new economic opportunities may arise for agriculturists, and the industry gets high-grade pre-products. Additionally, an on-farm refining can increase the quality of the products because of the instant processing. To reduce competition with the food production and to find new possibilities of utilisation for these habitats, the focus for new agricultural biomass should be on grasslands. But also croplands can provide more renewable raw materials without endangering a sustainable agriculture, e.g. by implementing legumes in the crop rotation. To decide if a region can provide adequate amounts of raw material for a biorefinery, new raw material assessment procedures have to be developed. In doing so, involvement of farmers is inevitable to generate a reliable study of the biomass refinery potentials.