2015 AAAS Annual Meeting (12-16 February 2015)

February 12 - 16, 2015

Sustainable Intensification in Agriculture: New Scientific Approaches

Sustainable intensification refers to increasing food production without reducing environmental quality. It is timely, since it has become a goal of major new programs among leading national and international institutions. Expanded interest and expertise has fueled the growth of innovative, interdisciplinary, and information-based scientific approaches. This session addresses advances, opportunities, and challenges in understanding sustainable intensification in agriculture in four new and major areas: first, emergent relations of agricultural intensification and potential sustainability to socioeconomic development, including the flow of information, goods, and services associated with recent telecoupling and concerns of social equity and food security; second, the increased role of knowledge systems pertaining to social-ecological indicators and services, such as biodiversity in the context of farmland resources and landscapes undergoing intensification; third, space-time complexity in the pathways of intensification, understood as multi-scale global processes and patterns using sources ranging from ecological anthropological models to increased interest and use of big data informatics and imaging; and, fourth, relations of intensification and potential for sustainability in the context of major global-change drivers, particularly the combination of environmental factors (e.g. climate change) and socioeconomic factors (e.g. urbanization).