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.
System dynamics and agent-based simulation modelling approaches have a potential as tools to evaluate the impact of policy related decision making in food value chains. The context is that a food value chain involves flows of multiple products, financial flows and decision making among the food value chain players. Each decision may be viewed from the level of independent actors, each with their own motivations and agenda, but responding to externalities and to the behaviours of other actors. The focus is to show how simulation modelling can be applied to problems such as fairness and power asymmetries in European food value chains by evaluating the outcome of interventions in terms of relevant operational indicators of interorganisational fairness (e.g., profit distribution, market power, bargaining power). The main concepts of system dynamics and agent-based modelling are introduced and the applicability of a hybrid of these methods to food value chains is justified. This approach is outlined as a research agenda, and it is demonstrated how cognitive maps can help in the initial conceptual model building when implemented for specific food value chains studied in the EU Horizon 2020 VALUMICS project. The French wheat to bread chain has many characteristics of food value chains in general and is applied as an example to formulate a model that can be extended to capture the functioning of European FVCs. This work is to be further progressed in a subsequent stream of research for the other food value chain case studies with different governance modes and market organisation, in particular, farmed salmon to fillet, dairy cows to milk and raw tomato to processed tomato.
L'agriculture doit faire face à de grands défis qui sont interdépendants : dérèglement climatique, production d'énergie, érosion de la biodiversité, pollution des milieux, sécurité alimentaire et santé humaine. Pour éclairer les politiques publiques, nous comparons des scénarios dont un objectif commun est l'atteinte de la neutralité carbone en 2050. Ils reposent sur différentes hypothèses de production de biomasse et de son allocation à l'élevage, aux produits biosourcés et au sol. L'état de l'art montre des interdépendances fortes entre ces différents domaines. Nous concluons que des innovations ou changements systémiques sont nécessaires pour faire face aux différents défis. Sur ces bases, nous montrons que les scénarios reposant le plus sur les technologies sont climato-centrés et ignorent les questions de biodiversité et de santé. A l'opposé, les scénarios plus multifonctionnels reposent sur des innovations plus systémiques, souvent déjà connues, sont meilleurs pour la biodiversité et la santé, mais sont plus difficiles à mettre en œuvre car demandant plus de sobriété dans la consommation de produits animaux et d'énergie et nécessitant de lever un plus grand nombre de verrous sociotechniques. Ces analyses suggèrent de mieux mobiliser les acquis agronomiques pour construire et évaluer des scénarios. En conclusion, nous montrons comment les scénarios les plus systémiques confortent le Green Deal et soulignent les insuffisances de la PAC. Mots-clés : agroécologie, élevage, dérèglement climatique, bioénergie ; séquestration du carbone
Scientists are now realizing how widespread human activities have been in ecosystems and the need to take them into account to understand their functioning (Willis et al. 2004), especially in the Mediterranean basin. In this anciently occupied region, humans have tapped the ecosystems for resources for millennia, modifying ecosystem characteristics (Grove and Rackham 2001, Quézel and Médail 2003) while maintaining high levels of biodiversity (Blondel 2006). However, this biodiversity is threatened by the speed of both climate and anthropogenic changes (Quézel and Médail 2003). On the northern shore, biodiversity is menaced by woody encroachment and habitat fragmentation (Scarascia-Mugnozza et al. 2000). Conversely, on the southern shore, demand for natural resources is ever growing and human activities inside forests are intensifying (Scarascia-Mugnozza et al. 2000). In this context, both researchers and managers critically lack knowledge about the impacts of human disturbances on Mediterranean forests (Scarascia-Mugnozza et al. 2000) and especially their combined effects (Wisdom et al. 2006). This lack of knowledge is especially true on the southern shore, where empirical data is scarce. Understanding these forests' functioning could (1) give insights considering pressure levels necessary to maintain biodiversity in the
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