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Agricultural intensification has significantly increased yields and fed growing populations across the planet, but has also led to considerable environmental degradation. In response an alternative process of 'Sustainable Intensification' (SI), whereby food production increases while environmental impacts are reduced, has been advocated as necessary, if not sufficient, for delivering food and environmental security. However, the extent to which SI has begun, the main drivers of SI, and the degree to which degradation is simply 'offshored' are uncertain. In this study we assess agroecosystem services in England and two contrasting sub-regions, majority-arable Eastern England and majority-pastoral South-Western England, since 1950 by analysing ecosystem service metrics and developing a simple system dynamics model. We find that rapid agricultural intensification drove significant environmental degradation in England in the early 1980s, but that most ecosystem services except farmland biodiversity began to recover after 2000, primarily due to reduced livestock and fertiliser usage decoupling from high yields. This partially follows the trajectory of an Environmental Kuznets Curve, with yields and GDP growth decoupling from environmental degradation above ~£17,000 per capita per annum. Together, these trends suggest that SI has begun in England. However, the lack of recovery in farmland biodiversity, and the reduction in UK food self-sufficiency resulting in some agricultural impacts being 'offshored', represent major negative trade-offs. Maintaining yields and restoring biodiversity while also addressing climate change, offshored degradation, and post-Brexit subsidy changes will require significant further SI in the future., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Agricultural intensification is best considered as the level of human appropriation of terrestrial net primary production. The global value is set to increase from 30%, increasing pressures on biodiversity. The pressures can be classified in terms of spatial scale, i.e. land cover, landscape management and crop management. Different lowland agricultural landscapes in Great Britain show differences among these pressures when habitat diversity and nutrient surplus are used as indicators. Eutrophication of plants was correlated to N surplus, and species richness of plants correlated with broad habitat diversity. Bird species diversity only correlated with habitat diversity when the diversity of different agricultural habitats was taken into account. The pressures of agricultural change may be reduced by minimizing loss of large habitats, minimizing permanent loss of agricultural land, maintaining habitat diversity in agricultural landscapes in order to provide ecosystem services, and minimizing pollution from nutrients and pesticides from the crops themselves. While these pressures could potentially be quantified using an internationally consistent set of indicators, their impacts would need to be assessed using a much larger number of locally applicable biodiversity indicators.

Understanding the trade‐offs between yield, ecosystem services, and other societal benefits is a fundamental prerequisite for the sustainable intensification of agriculture. Here, we develop and test an holistic approach to assessing farm performance across production, social, financial, and environmental dimensions. A longlist of potential indicators was reduced to a smaller subset of Headline Indicators, covering financial performance, levels of food production (standardized in terms of energy content), social characteristics of the farmer (including age, level of education, and degree of business cooperation), hours worked on the farm and provision of public access, and environmental quality (including impacts on climate regulation and water quality). A new index for biodiversity was created and validated, based on land use and management. Data were collected from 59 English and Welsh farms, using a questionnaire structured to be similar to the UK Farm Business Survey. Data were analyzed per farm and per unit area. The main overall variation in Headline Indicators was due to positive relationships between production, profitability and predicted levels of nitrate and GHG emissions, while social variables and biodiversity were generally unrelated to production. Cereal production was associated with relatively low levels of GHG emissions per unit of food production. There were strong differences in indicator profiles between farm types. Such metrics have value in helping understand how best to drive sustainable intensification, especially as it should involve reducing the pollution footprint of food production. Here we develop an holistic approach to assessing farm using indicators covering financial performance, food production, social characteristics, and environmental quality (including GHG emissions and a new index of biodiversity). This was applied to 59 farms. There were strong differences in indicator profiles between farm types, and positive relationships between production, profitability and predicted levels of pollution, while social variables and biodiversity were generally unrelated to production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: There is a fundamental need for agri-environment schemes to succeed and to be shown to be succeeding. Many agri-environment schemes in Europe have multiple objectives and should be evaluated against all of them. In previous studies a multi-disciplinary method of evaluation was developed and used for the evaluation of two English agri-environment schemes (Countryside Stewardship Scheme, CSS; Environmental Sensitive Areas Scheme, ESA). In this paper the multi-disciplinary method is revisited to determine whether the results reported can be used to infer the degree to which the two schemes meet their wildlife objectives because criticism has been made of scheme efficacy by conservation practicioners. Five hundred and ninety-eight scheme agreements with landowners were rescored by an ecologist alone and compared to the scores of the multi-disciplinary panel. The appropriateness of agreements was significantly lower for both schemes and the predicted environmental effectiveness of the ESA scheme was lower as well, when scored by the ecologist alone. We conclude that the results previously reported on the functioning of the two schemes cannot be used to indicate the success/failure in terms of the wildlife objectives alone. Constants are calculated that can convert the scores from the evaluation for all objectives combined to a score that is appropriate for the wildlife objectives alone. The results of the multi-disciplinary evaluation reported previously can be recalculated using the results presented herein to assess the wildlife objectives. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]