The agricultural sector faces global sustainability challenges, including overuse of agro-chemicals, rising greenhouse gas emissions, degraded soils, simplified landscapes, poor working conditions, waning profitability and loss of livelihoods.
Solution
Several farm-based “Sustainability Assessment Tools” (SATs) have been developed to address these challenges by allowing farmers to assess their performances and support better management decisions.
Description
A farm sustainability assessment can illuminate challenges
(e.g. agrobiodiversity conservation) and highlight strengths (e.g. high productivity). The results can be used for learning, improvement, communication, monitoring or benchmarking. SATs should be easy to use, cover all sustainability dimensions, use qualitative and quantitative data and support strategic decisions (Pintér et al. 2012). At least 19 free SATs emerged in the past decade for farm decision-making (Arulnathan et al. 2020). They differ in goals, criteria, level of detail and ease of use (Coteur et al. 2020). Four examples are shown in Table 1. SATs can facilitate system comparisons and generate useful datasets for research, such as assessing the benefits of farm diversification.
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