Improving agricultural practices for sustainable development

该项目由NSF科学、工程和教育促进可持续发展研究员(SEE FLOLS)计划支持，目标是帮助实现必要的发现，为导致环境、能源和社会可持续发展的行动提供信息，同时创造必要的劳动力来应对这些挑战。可持续发展科学是一个新兴领域，它解决了在不损害环境、不牺牲子孙后代满足其需求的能力的情况下满足人类需求的挑战。一支强大的科学队伍需要接受跨学科研究和思维方面的教育和培训，特别是在可持续发展科学领域。在SEES奖学金的支持下，该项目将使一位有前途的早期职业研究人员能够在与可持续发展相关的独立研究生涯中确立自己的地位。这意味着联谊会项目的重点是粮食可持续发展。寻找在不进一步加剧气候变化、减少生物多样性或降低水资源的情况下增加全球粮食供应的方法是人类面临的最重要的挑战之一。该项目的目标是创建可供政策制定者和农民使用的信息，以促进世界上两个最大的粮食种植国和出口国采用更可持续的农业做法。特别是，该项目调查了需要哪些有利条件(政策、市场机制和推广计划)来帮助农民从专门的生产实践过渡到综合作物和牲畜系统(ICLS)。该项目还考察了在未来气候和价格情况下ICLS的稳健性。以前的生态学研究表明，ICLS具有极大地减少农业对环境的影响的潜力，但尚不清楚ICLS是否在社会经济上适合生产者和其他利益攸关方。如果这些制度不能满足农民的核心需求(通过创造收入、降低风险和消除收入流动)，它们就不太可能被采用。此外，必须了解ICLS是否将满足未来价格和气候情景下农民的需求。该项目通过回答以下问题来解决这些知识差距：1)特定地区的农民面临什么问题？2)与其他潜在的竞争技术相比，ICLS提供的好处如何解决这些农民定义的问题？3)鉴于潜在的生物物理条件和交通基础设施，集成系统最有可能盈利的地方是哪里？4)哪些社会经济和生物物理因素对农民采用ICLS的意愿影响最大？5)这些社会经济和生物物理因素的未来变化将如何影响ICLS未来的采用或停用？该项目利用了多种方法和空间尺度：国家一级的比较案例研究、区域统计和机制模型以及地方实地调查。

The project is supported under the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellows (SEES Fellows) program, with the goal of helping to enable discoveries needed to inform actions that lead to environmental, energy and societal sustainability while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges. Sustainability science is an emerging field that addresses the challenges of meeting human needs without harm to the environment, and without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their needs. A strong scientific workforce requires individuals educated and trained in interdisciplinary research and thinking, especially in the area of sustainability science. With the SEES Fellowship support, this project will enable a promising early career researcher to establish herself in an independent research career related to sustainability. This SEES Fellowship project focuses on food sustainability.Finding ways to increase the global food supply without further exacerbating climate change, reducing biodiversity, or degrading water resources is one of the most important challenges facing humanity. The goal of this project is to create information that can be used by policy makers and farmers to promote the adoption of more sustainable agricultural practices in two of the largest food growers and exporters in the world. In particular, this project investigates what enabling conditions (policies, market mechanisms, and extension programs) are needed to help farmers transition from specialized production practices to integrated crop and livestock systems (ICLS). The project also examines the robustness of ICLS under future climate and price scenarios.Prior ecological research suggests that ICLS have the potential to vastly reduce the environmental impact of agriculture, but it is not clear whether ICLS are socio-economically suitable to producers and other stakeholders. If these systems do not address the core needs of farmers (by generating income, decreasing risk, and smoothing out income flows), it is unlikely that they will be adopted. Furthermore, it is essential to understand whether ICLS will meet farmers' needs under future prices and climate scenarios. This project addresses these knowledge gaps by answering the following questions: 1) What are the problems faced by farmers in a given region? 2) How do the benefits provided by ICLS solve these farmer-defined problems as compared to other potential competing technologies? 3) Where are integrated systems most likely to be profitable, given underlying biophysical conditions and transportation infrastructure? 4) What socio-economic and biophysical factors have the largest influence on farmers' willingness to adopt ICLS? 5) How will future changes in these socio-economic and biophysical factors influence future adoption or retirement of ICLS? This project utilizes multiple methods and spatial scales: comparative case studies at the national level, regional statistical and mechanistic models, and local fieldwork.