Abstract
ustainable food systems (FS) require providing food and other goods and services to humans satisfying food security, right to food, income, social justice and resilience, without degrading human health and hiving high environmental performance. The environmental performance of FS can be evaluated using Life Cycle Assessment. However, research on the impact that FS activities, e.g. crop production have on the capacity of farm-based agroecosystems to provide goods and services to humans is still incipient. Our underlying aim was to understand how FS impact on the provision of agroecosystem services and how this relates to the environmental performance of FS, as a basis for supporting decision-making on how to make FS more sustainable. We propose the Agroecosystem Service Capacity (ASC) as a method for assessing farmbased agroecosystem services, it builds on the Ecosystem Service Matrix by Burkhard et al. (2009) and assesses land cover classes against 20 agroecosystem services. The method was applied to eighteen farmbased agroecosystems in Bolivia and Kenya. Here we present two examples for exploring its potentials and limitations. The ASC operates on the basis of land cover class units and permits the calculation of an aggregate ASC-index for farm-based agroecosystems forming part of a specific FS.
Highlights
Humans have modified the Earth’s surface to such an extent that some refer to the current geological epoch as the Anthropocene, thereby equating the importance of human impact on Earth withpast geophysical processes (Crutzen & Stoermer 2011; Steffen et al 2011)
To develop the Agroecosystem Service Capacity (ASC) approach we followed four steps: i) Land cover classification: We defined an approach for land cover classification in farm-based agroecosystems” (FBAs). ii) Agroecosystem services: We defined which of the commonly used ecosystem services in the scientific literature are relevant for FBAs directly related to and shaped by food systems. iii) Indicators and rating scale: We identified the indicators needed to assess each FBA services and created a rating scale for each indicator adapted to the food system context and the data available. iv) Matrix: We developed an Agroecosystem Service Matrix that serves for aggregating the data collected and calculating an ASC for each land cover class and an ASCIndex for the whole FBA
In the previous sections we described the method for land cover classification and the definition of individual related FBA services, both of which are the building blocks of what we call the Agroecosystem Service Matrix (ASM)
Summary
Humans have modified the Earth’s surface to such an extent that some refer to the current geological epoch as the Anthropocene, thereby equating the importance of human impact on Earth withpast geophysical processes (Crutzen & Stoermer 2011; Steffen et al 2011). Agricultural production and related activities – from provision of food products to consumption and waste – are an important factor of the Anthropocene. Together, these activities have modified approximately 40% of the Earth’s surface (Foley et al 2005). Nutritional outcomes are poor and the environmental impacts related to food production are severe, mainly regarding land cover change and the degradation of ecosystem services (Ericksen 2008; Therond et al 2017). The magnitude of the differences between ecosystems and agroecosystems depends on management decisions and levels of ecosystem modification (Altieri 1983)
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