Assessing the energy trap of industrial agriculture in North America and Europe: 82 balances from 1830 to 2012.

Early energy analyses of agriculture revealed that behind higher labor and land productivity of industrial farming, there was a decrease in energy returns on energy (EROI) invested, in comparison to more traditional organic agricultural systems. Studies on recent trends show that efficiency gains in production and use of inputs have again somewhat improved energy returns. However, most of these agricultural energy studies have focused only on external inputs at the crop level, concealing the important role of internal biomass flows that livestock and forestry recirculate within agroecosystems. Here, we synthesize the results of 82 farm systems in North America and Europe from 1830 to 2012 that for the first time show the changing energy profiles of agroecosystems, including livestock and forestry, with a multi-EROI approach that accounts for the energy returns on external inputs, on internal biomass reuses, and on all inputs invested. With this historical circular bioeconomic approach, we found a general trend towards much lower external returns, little or no increases in internal returns, and almost no improvement in total returns. This "energy trap" was driven by shifts towards a growing dependence of crop production on fossil-fueled external inputs, much more intensive livestock production based on feed grains, less forestry, and a structural disintegration of agroecosystem components by increasingly linear industrial farm managements. We conclude that overcoming the energy trap requires nature-based solutions to reduce current dependence on fossil-fueled external industrial inputs and increase the circularity and complexity of agroecosystems to provide healthier diets with less animal products. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13593-023-00925-5.

Assessing the sustainability of contrasting land use scenarios through the Socioecological Integrated Analysis (SIA) of the metropolitan green infrastructure in Barcelona.

Urban development and the sprawl of transport infrastructures have disregarded the crucial function of metropolitan landscape in provisioning human well-being and biodiversity. This research aims to contribute to the challenges of Planning for Sustainability by proposing a Socioecological Integrated Analysis (SIA) to support the Land Use Master Plan in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area, to conciliate urban development with the performance of surrounding open spaces. The paper evaluates four different land cover scenarios (current, trending, alternative and potential), and two kinds of agricultural management (conventional and a socioecological transition towards organic agriculture). The results suggest that although there are significant improvements on job provisioning and nutrient-cycling closures (circular economy), certified organic agriculture is not enough to overcome some trends of industrialized agrarian systems such as low energy efficiency or poor improvements in greenhouse gas emissions. The results also show a crossed effect between social metabolism and landscape ecology where changes in the management could affect the landscape functioning while changes in the land covers are particularly affecting the resource use. Then, deeper changes that consider together land use and metabolic flows are required to promote more sustainable agroecological transitions. The SIA model is an important conceptual and methodological step forward that facilitates the transition towards sustainable land use policies.

A landscape ecology assessment of land-use change on the Great Plains-Denver (CO, USA) metropolitan edge.

For better or worse, in those parts of the world with a widespread farming, livestock rising, and urban expansion, the maintenance of species richness and ecosystem services cannot depend only upon protected natural sites. Can they rely on a network of cultural landscapes endowed with their own associated biodiversity? We analyze the effects of land-cover change on landscape ecological patterns and processes that sustain bird species richness associated to cropland-grassland landscapes in the Great Plains-Denver metropolitan edge. Our purpose is to assess the potential contribution to bird biodiversity maintenance of Great Plain's cropland-grassland mosaics kept as farmland green belts in the edge of metropolitan areas. We present a quantitative landscape ecology assessment of land-cover changes (1930-2010) experienced in five Great Plains counties in Colorado. Several landscape metrics assess the diversity of land-cover patterns and their impact on ecological connectivity indices. These metrics are applied to historical land-cover maps and datasets drawn from aerial photos and satellite imagery. The results show that the cropland-grassland mosaics that link the metropolitan edge with the surrounding habitats sheltered in less human-disturbed areas provide a heterogeneous land matrix were a high bird species richness exists. They also suggest that keeping multifunctional farmland-grassland green belts near the edge of metropolitan areas may provide important ecosystem services, supplementing traditional conservation policies. Our maps and indicators can be used for selecting certain types of landscape patterns and priority areas on which biodiversity conservation efforts and land-use planning can concentrate.

New criteria for sustainable land use planning of metropolitan green infrastructures in the tropical Andes.

Context: Urbanization is rapidly increasing worldwide, with about 60% of the global population currently residing in cities and expected to reach 68% by 2050. In Latin America's tropical Andes region, managing these changes poses challenges, including biodiversity loss and vulnerability to climate change. Objectives: This study assesses urban growth and agricultural intensification impacts on the ecological functionality of metropolitan green infrastructures and their capacity to provide ecosystem services using a landscape sustainability and sociometabolic approach. Specifically, it aims to identify landscape configurations promoting socio-ecological sustainability amidst rapid urbanization. Methods: A landscape-metabolic model (IDC) was applied to evaluate the interactions between land use changes and ecosystem functions in the metropolitan region of Cali. Results: Agricultural intensification and industrialization, coupled with uncontrolled urban growth, have significantly transformed the landscape, posing threats to its sustainability. The prevailing biocultural landscapes hold a substantial potential to provide essential ecosystem services to the metropolis. The IDC offers an approach that utilizes a land cover map and agricultural production/metabolism data to calculate an indicator closely related to ecosystem services and multifunctionality. Conclusions: The IDC model stands out for efficiently capturing landscape dynamics, providing insights into landscape configuration and social metabolism without extensive resource requirements. This research highlights the importance of adopting a landscape-metabolic and green infrastructure framework to guide territorial policies in the tropical Andes and similar regions. It stresses the need for informed land use planning to address challenges and leverage opportunities presented by biocultural landscapes for regional sustainability amidst rapid urbanization and agricultural expansion.

Displaying geographic variability of peri-urban agriculture environmental impacts in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona: A regionalized life cycle assessment.

Peri urban agriculture (peri-UA) can supply food locally and potentially more sustainably than far-away conventional agricultural systems. It can also introduce significant environmental impacts depending on the local biophysical conditions and resources required to implement it and, on the crops managing practices, which could vary widely among growers. Sophisticated methods to account for such variability while assessing direct (on-site) and indirect (up/down stream) environmental impacts of peri-UA implementation are thus needed. We implemented an attributional, regionalized, cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment (LCA) for which we derive spatially explicit inventories and calculate 14 impacts due to peri-UA using the ReCiPe method. Further, to show the importance of impact assessment regionalization for the environmental assessment of peri-UA, we regionalize eutrophication impacts characterization. We use the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona (AMB) to illustrate these methodological developments. Vegetables and greenhouses, the prevalent peri-UA land uses, had the largest impacts assessed, of all peri-UA land uses. European NPK mineral fertilizer production to cover N demand of these crops drives all impacts. For fruit crops, on-site N emissions drive marine eutrophication impacts and for irrigated herbaceous crops, phosphate runoff drives freshwater eutrophication impacts. Geographic variability of peri-UA metabolic flows and impacts was displayed. Management practices at the plots, which are linked the land use, are responsible for impacts variability. Regionalization of eutrophication impacts highlights the importance of accounting for the biophysical aspects at the geographic scale at which peri-UA takes place, which is a much finer scale than those implemented in current regionalization of impact assessment methods in LCA. This study provides a fundamental baseline needed to assess transition scenarios of peri-UA at an appropriate geographic level of analysis and gives essential knowledge to guide appropriate circular and sustainability strategies for the sector.

An energy-landscape integrated analysis to evaluate agroecological scarcity.

Agrarian landscapes theoretically provide ecosystem services that meet the demands of a wide range of socioecological processes. Consequently, any landscape agroecology approach must tackle the dynamic interaction of land-use distribution and associated social metabolism at different spatiotemporal scales. An agroecological scarcity case study explores how driven agricultural energy flows interact with landscape complexity in arid landscapes of 46 counties in the Qazvin Province (Iran). An Energy-Landscape Integrated Analysis (ELIA) was performed to correlate the energy reinvestment (E) and energy redistribution (I) present within the social metabolism network, with landscape complexity (Le) measured in terms of spatial patterns and related ecological processes. As well, a cluster analysis was run to establish agrarian landscape typologies based on the ELIA indicators. The results of this study provide an explicit sketch of the four strategies that society in Qazvin Province has developed within the dry environments that sustain it. Our findings confirm the hypothesis that there is a positive relationship between optimizing non-dissipative internal energy loops and landscape complexity, which can explain agroecosystem sustainability. This research enables us to define spatially informed agroecological transitions from a territorially explicit socioecological perspective and will make a significant contribution to decisions on agricultural policies given different land-use strategies, especially under scenarios of ecological scarcity.

Building on Margalef: Testing the links between landscape structure, energy and information flows driven by farming and biodiversity.

The aim of this paper is to test two methodologies, applicable to different spatial scales (from regional to local), to predict the capacity of agroecosystems to provide habitats for the species richness of butterflies and birds, based on the ways their socio-metabolic flows change the ecological functionality of bio-cultural landscapes. First, we use the more general Intermediate Disturbance-Complexity (IDC) model to assess how different levels of human appropriation of photosynthetic production affect the landscape functional structure that hosts biodiversity. Second, we apply a more detailed Energy-Landscape Integrated Analysis (ELIA) model that focusses on the energy storage carried out by the internal biomass loops, and the energy information held in the network of energy flows driven by farmers, in order to correlate both (the energy reinvested and redistributed) with the energy imprinted in the landscape patterns and processes that sustain biodiversity. The results obtained after applying both models in the province and the metropolitan region of Barcelona support the Margalef's energy-information-structure hypothesis by showing positive relations between butterflies' species richness, IDC and ELIA, and between birds' species richness and energy information. Our findings support the view that strong relationships between farming energy flows, agroecosystem functioning and biodiversity can be detected, and highlight the importance of farmers' knowledge and labour to maintain bio-cultural landscapes.

Exploring the links between social metabolism and biodiversity distribution across landscape gradients: A regional-scale contribution to the land-sharing versus land-sparing debate.

The debate about the relative merits of the 'land-sparing' and 'land-sharing' approaches to biodiversity conservation is usually addressed at local scale. Here, however, we undertake a regional-scale approach to this issue by exploring the association between the Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production (HANPP) and biodiversity components (plants, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals) across a gradient of human-transformed landscapes in Catalonia, Spain. We propose an Intermediate Disturbance Complexity (IDC) model to assess how human disturbance of the photosynthetic capacity affects the landscape patterns and processes that host biodiversity. This model enables us to explore the association between social metabolism (HANPP), landscape structure (composition and spatial configuration) and biodiversity (species richness) by using Negative Binomial Regression (NBR), Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). The empirical association between IDC and landscape complexity and HANPP in Catalonia confirms the expected values of the intermediate disturbance hypothesis. There is some increase in biodiversity when high IDC values correspond to landscape mosaics. NBR and EFA show positive associations between species richness and increasing values of IDC and forest cover for all biodiversity groups except birds. SEM shows that total biodiversity is positively determined by forest cover and, to a lesser extent, by HANPP, and that both factors are negatively associated with each other. The results suggest that 'natural' landscapes (i.e. those dominated by forests) and agroforestry mosaics (i.e. heterogeneous landscapes characterized by a set of land uses possessing contrasting disturbances) provide a synergetic contribution to biodiversity conservation. This 'virtuous triangle' consisting of forest cover, HANPP and biodiversity illustrates the complex human-nature relationships that exist across landscape gradients of human transformation. This energy-landscape integrated analysis provides a robust assessment of the ecological impact of land-use policies at regional scale.