Putting permanent grassland at the heart of a European agroecological transition: Findings and questions arising from the ‘Ten Years for Agroecology’ (TYFA) scenario

Abstract

While the importance of permanent grasslands (PG) for the conservation of high nature value habitats is often acknowledged, their role in most of the main sustainable food system scenarios published in the last few years is less explicit. In the best case, the place of permanent grassland in scenarios and policy agendas is their conservation; in the worst one, they are simply replaced by afforested land or cropland, considered as a better option when the focus is on GHG emissions only. In this paper, we defend the idea that several misinterpretations of the positive and negative impacts of ruminants, the ‘natural’ users of PG, explain why ruminants are poorly addressed by most scenarios. Based on the findings of an agroecological scenario for Europe—TYFA, standing for Ten Years For Agroecology—in which extensive permanent grassland and ruminants together play a prominent role for biodiversity conservation, nitrogen cycling and climate change mitigation and adaptation, we call for a research agenda that would better inform the specific role of PG in the provision of ecosystem services—and in particular those that depend on nitrogen management.

Land Consumption of Current Diets Compared to the Planetary Health Diet: How many People can our Land Feed?

“…for our clothes, tobacco for smokers, bio-gas or bio-diesel and renewable raw materials for industry [55], the usage of the nearly 1,200 m² (SSD 100%) of crop land could be considered as a non-balanced share. In accordance with [56], we conclude that our diet needs to be adapted to a diet consisting of less animal products. The change in behaviour towards the PHD seems to be imperative if the regions do not want to continue to "live too large".…”

Key research challenges to supporting farm transitions to agroecology in advanced economies. A review

“…In contrast, expert-based foresight approaches, which have been developed in agricultural sciences (e.g., van der Meulen et al 2003;Freibauer et al 2011;Bourgeois and Sette 2017;Mora et al 2020), often operate at much larger levels than that of farms (Eames and McDowall 2010), ranging from regions or sectors (Bergez et al 2011) to all of Europe (Poux and Aubert 2018). They have difficulty combining micro and macro levels, which is reflected well by the range of actors who have participated in them (e.g., no farmers).…”

“…Accordingly, only a few integrated foresight approaches consider the agronomic consistency of the farms they design. For instance, Poux and Aubert (2018) developed a scenario based on integrated crop-livestock systems that included typical crop rotations and related cropping practices. However, this challenges the local relevance of macro-agronomic scenarios that were designed to function in larger-level scenarios (e.g., Europe).…”

SEGAE: An online serious game to learn agroecology

“…Indeed, beyond learning about agroecological practices and their impacts, SEGAE was built to foster discussion and debate in ways that complement other studies of agroecology and its impacts on sustainability (e.g., Poux and Aubert (2019)).…”