2015 AAAS Annual Meeting (12-16 February 2015)

February 12 - 16, 2015

Beyond Intensification: Measuring the "Sustainable" in Sustainable Intensification

Sustainable intensification (SI) provides a useful and widely adopted conceptual framework for achieving the necessary increases in farm productivity while also ensuring support for social and ecological resources. Unlike the intensification component of the SI concept, the sustainable component requires complex measurements across multiple scales and disciplines. In this interactive session, scientists will discuss how advances in remote sensing, geospatial information systems, farm modeling, and data management are helping to make such complex assessments practical, standardized, and useful for stakeholders beyond the scientific community. Drawing on experiences in agricultural development programs, such as Vital Signs and Africa Research in Sustainable Intensification for the Next Generation, speakers will present several examples of sustainable intensification assessments developed for a range of international agricultural settings. After the presentations, breakout sessions will allow audience participants to assist in refining these frameworks to ensure they are quantitative, outcome-oriented, practical on temporal and geographic scales appropriate for experimental research, broadly relevant across a variety of agroecological contexts, and address multiple dimensions of sustainability (i.e., environmental, social, and economic).