Sustainability Impact Assessment – An Overview with a Holistic and Transdisciplinary Perspective towards Agricultural Research

Abstract

It is important to insert agricultural research in this paper by considering it as a strategic area for providing knowledge and a technological base for agricultural production, considering that this sector generates outcomes with respective impacts to rural zones, supply-chain, economy, society and environment, representing a key piece for reaching United Nations objectives of sustainable development to each country and to the planet. Aiming to analyze how agricultural research organizations (as for instance: INRA and CIRAD, from France and EMBRAPA, from Brazil) have driving sustainability impact assessment methodologies and their interaction with transdisciplinary and holistic principles, using as a base innovation concepts. This paper will display an overview on concepts and approaches about sustainability impact assessment, but looking from a transversal perspective, passing by an historical description on impact assessment and on concepts related to sustainable development and sustainability. We will search for unedited models of sustainability impact systems by converging holism, transdisciplinarity and sustainability. There are several methodologies but few demonstrate an integrated view with a transversal perspective. It is also imperceptible any concrete governance-managerial system for sustainability impact assessment, considering every stage of the process, from a strategic to an operational level, including, analyzing environment, economy and society dimensions as one unique perspective. Such as a complex and multidimensional sector of economy, agricultural research requires profiled sustainability impact assessment with an innovative and dynamic approach.

Landscape and Tourism: Evolution of Research Topics

“…The first theme is the most central, but it can be said that all three are highly developed and essential in the construction of the research area. Although "sustainability" will not appear again in the following periods of the field's evolution, it is a transdisciplinary concept [71,72] which, as can be seen in its network of keywords ( Figure 5), is related to 11 other keywords: "ecotourism", "recreation", "planning", "conservation", "agriculture", "destination", "islands", "land use", "resources", "environment" and "globalization". Although "sustainability" does not appear in the conceptual maps of the following stages, most of these keywords do, so it cannot be said that sustainability is not being addressed after 2003, but rather that it is being worked on in a less direct and more transversal way in conjunction with various other themes.…”