Sustainable Nitrogen Management Index

Zhang, Xin; Davidson, Eric A.

doi:10.1002/essoar.10501111.1

Cited by 8 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…In addition to the cross‐scale assessment, it is important to evaluate the impacts of nutrient management on other sustainability targets, such as food security and land use change. Integrating the efficiencies of nitrogen use (i.e., NUE) and land use (i.e., yield) on a national scale, a Sustainable Nitrogen Management Index has been developed and applied to measure the sustainability of agricultural production on the national scale (Sachs et al, ; Schmidt‐Traub et al, ; Zhang & Davidson, ). However, this index is still limited in the scope of sustainability targets included in the assessment.…”

Section: Challenges In Informing Nutrient Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying Nutrient Budgets for Sustainable Nutrient Management

Zhang

Davidson

Zou

et al. 2020

Global Biogeochemical Cycles

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119

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Nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, provide vital support for human life, but overloading nutrients to the Earth system leads to environmental concerns, such as water and air pollution on local scales and climate change on the global scale. With an urgent need to feed the world's growing population and the growing concern over nutrient pollution and climate change, sustainable nutrient management has become a major challenge for this century. To address this challenge, the growing body of research on nutrient budgets, namely the nutrient inputs and outputs of a given system, has provided great opportunities for improving scientific knowledge of the complex nutrient cycles in the coupled human and natural systems. This knowledge can help inform stakeholders, such as farmers, consumers, and policy makers, on their decisions related to nutrient management. This paper systematically reviews major challenges, as well as opportunities, in defining, quantifying, and applying nutrient budgets. Nutrient budgets have been defined for various systems with different research or application purposes, but the lack of consistency in the system definition and its budget terms has hindered intercomparison among studies and experience‐sharing among researchers and regions. Our review synthesizes existing nutrient budgets under a framework with five systems (i.e., Soil‐Plant system, Animal system, Animal‐Plant‐Soil system, Agro‐Food system, and Landscape system) and four spatial scales (i.e., Plot and Farm, Watershed, National, and Global scales). We define these systems and identify issues of nitrogen and phosphorus budgets within each. Few nutrient budgets have been well balanced at any scale, due to the large uncertainties in the quantification of several major budget terms. The type and level of challenges vary across spatial scales and also differ among nutrients. Improvement in nutrient budgets will rely not only on the technological advancement of scientific observations and models but also on better bookkeeping of human activity data. While some nutrient budget terms may need decades, or even centuries, of research to be well quantified within desirable levels of uncertainties, it is imperative to effectively communicate to interested stakeholders our understanding of nutrient budgets so that scientists and a variety of stakeholders can work together to address the sustainable nutrient management challenge of this century.

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Section: Challenges In Informing Nutrient Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying Nutrient Budgets for Sustainable Nutrient Management

Zhang

Davidson

Zou

et al. 2020

Global Biogeochemical Cycles

Self Cite

119

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Among these, we do not consider the indicator "Prevalence of undernourishment (%)" since it is similar to the one in the official database. The indicators analyzed are "Prevalence of stunting, under-5s (%)", "Prevalence of wasting, under-5s (%)", "Prevalence of adult obesity", "Cereal yield (t/ha)", and "Sustainable Nitrogen Management Index" [43]. Table 4 shows an overall evaluation of the official UN indicators and those used by SDSN.…”

Section: Imentioning

confidence: 99%

Sustainable Development Goals Indicators: A Methodological Proposal for a Multidimensional Fuzzy Index in the Mediterranean Area

et al. 2019

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This paper describes a methodology for the construction of a multidimensional index for sustainability assessment in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the UN 2030 Agenda. The methodology is designed to properly capture the multidimensional nature of sustainable development and the SDG framework, introducing an innovative Fuzzy Multidimensional Index to measure the performance of Mediterranean countries. The focus is on agro-food sustainability, in-line with the aims of the Partnership for Research and Innovation in the Mediterranean Area (PRIMA). Drawing on fuzzy set theory, a step-by-step procedure was developed: the underlying dimensions of a set of selected indicators for the SDGs are identified by exploratory factor analysis; an innovative weighting method is applied to aggregate the indicators and calculate the country scores for each dimension and the Fuzzy Multidimensional Index. The PRIMA program will be a first step towards the implementation of innovative solutions, by funding international cooperation projects between countries on both sides of the Mediterranean for a decade: the Fuzzy Multidimensional Index will be the primary source of data for evaluating such projects and policies implemented from them; the Index will therefore be able to close a gap in the availability of appropriate data.

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“…In contrast to the water and land risk indicators which measure the environmental sustainability of resource, the energy risk indicator did not measure the environmental sustainability of national energy use since such a metric (such as the proportion of renewable energy production in national energy mix) does not meaningfully capture energy (in)security and related risks. Index (SNMI), developed byZhang and Davidson (2016) based on data from FAO (2019) and compiled byUniversity (2019) for 2010. The SNMI provides a proxy for the productivity and sustainability of…”

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confidence: 99%