Improving agricultural practices for sustainable development

该项目由美国国家科学基金会（NSF）科学、工程和教育可持续发展研究员（SEES研究员）计划支持，其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的领域，它解决了在不损害环境的情况下满足人类需求的挑战，同时又不牺牲后代满足其需求的能力。一支强大的科学队伍需要在跨学科研究和思维方面受过教育和训练的个人，特别是在可持续性科学领域。在SEES奖学金的支持下，该项目将使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建立自己。see奖学金项目的重点是食品可持续性。如何在不进一步加剧气候变化、减少生物多样性或使水资源退化的情况下增加全球粮食供应，是人类面临的最重要挑战之一。该项目的目标是创建可供决策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。该项目特别研究了需要什么样的有利条件（政策、市场机制和推广计划）来帮助农民从专业化生产方式过渡到作物和牲畜综合系统（ICLS）。该项目还考察了ICLS在未来气候和价格情景下的稳健性。先前的生态学研究表明，ICLS有可能大大减少农业对环境的影响，但目前尚不清楚ICLS是否适合生产者和其他利益相关者。如果这些系统不能解决农民的核心需求（通过创造收入、降低风险和平滑收入流动），它们就不太可能被采用。此外，了解ICLS在未来价格和气候情景下是否能满足农民的需求至关重要。本项目通过回答以下问题来解决这些知识差距：1)特定地区农民面临的问题是什么？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)考虑到潜在的生物物理条件和交通基础设施，综合系统最有可能在哪里盈利？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的未来采用或退役？该项目采用多种方法和空间尺度：国家层面的比较案例研究、区域统计和机制模型以及当地实地调查。

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.