Issues of sustainability and sustainable land management

Abstract

The concept of sustainability shows many facets. Ecologists, environmentalists, agronomists, sociologists, economists and politicians use it with different connotations. In addition, the sustainability of land management systems varies in space, according to climate, soil, technology and societal conditions. Sustainable farming systems vary also in time, as they evolve and may collapse, frequently together with the corresponding sociosystems. Because of its complexity, sustainability is difficult to measure directly and requires the use of appropriate indicators for assessment. A good indicator is free of bias, sensitive to temporal changes and spatial variability, predictive and referenced to threshold values. Relevant data are often incomplete or inadequate for indicator implementation. To embrace the whole width of sustainability, several methods and techniques should be used concurrently, including land evaluation and coevolutionary, retrospective and knowledge-based approaches. It is, however, at the application level that major constraints arise. A sustainable land management system must satisfy a large variety of requirements, including technological feasibility, economic viability, political desirability, administrative manageability, social acceptability, and environmental soundness. Real world conditions at farm and policy-making levels need to be substantially improved to achieve sustainable land management. Key words: Definition, assessment and implementation issues of sustainable land management