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      A sustainability scoreboard for crop provision in Europe

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          Highlights

          • This paper links international statistical environmental-economic standards for natural resources and ecosystem service accounts.

          • In accounting for crop provision, an emergy approach is applied to identify and disentangle natural inputs from anthropogenic factors and measure ecosystem contribution to this service.

          • Moreover, a sustainability scoreboard is derived to analyse how relevant economic, social and environmental components behave by country and by crop and to align this analytical effort with the international call for the Sustainable development Goals (SDG), including SDG 12, Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns, and SDG 15, Life on land, which promotes the sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems as essential natural resources for economy and society.

          Abstract

          The System of Environmental-Economic Accounting for Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (SEEA AFF) offers the possibility to assess and report detailed accounts for primary industries while establishing important linkages with relevant ecosystem services, in line with the SEEA Experimental Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EEA). In this paper, crop products and crop provision as ecosystem service are coherently merged to build a sustainability scoreboard for selected crops in European countries. The sustainability scoreboard uses the SEEA AFF accounts for crop products with data inputs from FAOSTAT and the Integrated system of Natural Capital Accounts (INCA) of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) for ecosystem services. The combined FAO-JRC accounting table described in this paper provides a common ground and measurement tool towards a sustainability scoreboard, useful to analyse how relevant economic, social and environmental components behave by country. This newly derived sustainability scoreboard presents significant differences with respect to analyses based on standard agricultural statistics. Lack of sufficiently accurate data remains the major limitation to current fuller implementation of the sustainability scoreboard. However reasonable assumption can be made that ongoing international data collection processes (including FAO questionnaires) integrated with Geographic Information System (GIS) analysis will supply in the near future additional relevant and applicable information.

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          Most cited references11

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          Ecosystem services and agriculture: tradeoffs and synergies

          Agricultural ecosystems provide humans with food, forage, bioenergy and pharmaceuticals and are essential to human wellbeing. These systems rely on ecosystem services provided by natural ecosystems, including pollination, biological pest control, maintenance of soil structure and fertility, nutrient cycling and hydrological services. Preliminary assessments indicate that the value of these ecosystem services to agriculture is enormous and often underappreciated. Agroecosystems also produce a variety of ecosystem services, such as regulation of soil and water quality, carbon sequestration, support for biodiversity and cultural services. Depending on management practices, agriculture can also be the source of numerous disservices, including loss of wildlife habitat, nutrient runoff, sedimentation of waterways, greenhouse gas emissions, and pesticide poisoning of humans and non-target species. The tradeoffs that may occur between provisioning services and other ecosystem services and disservices should be evaluated in terms of spatial scale, temporal scale and reversibility. As more effective methods for valuing ecosystem services become available, the potential for ‘win–win’ scenarios increases. Under all scenarios, appropriate agricultural management practices are critical to realizing the benefits of ecosystem services and reducing disservices from agricultural activities.
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            A framework for evaluating ecosystem services provided by cover crops in agroecosystems

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              Beyond the economic boundaries to account for ecosystem services

              Highlights • An ecological extension of the current SEEA EEA is proposed. • Broad typologies setting how ecosystem deliver services are identified. • Concepts of ES potential, ES potential flows, ES demand, ES actual flows are defined. • Capacity accounts are built based on measurement of ES overuse. • Examples of water purification, outdoor recreation and crop pollination are shown in EU.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Ecosyst Serv
                Ecosyst Serv
                Ecosystem Services
                Elsevier B.V
                2212-0416
                1 December 2020
                December 2020
                : 46
                : 101194
                Affiliations
                [a ]Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Via delle Terme di Caracalla, 00100 Rome, Italy
                [b ]European Commission - Joint Research Centre, Via Enrico Fermi 2749, 21027 Ispra, VA, Italy
                [c ]IUAV - University of Venice, Via Santa Croce 191, 30135 Venezia, VE, Italy
                Author notes
                Article
                S2212-0416(20)30136-4 101194
                10.1016/j.ecoser.2020.101194
                7722507
                5ef4817a-c5ae-4f6f-9e63-9fe18f143010
                © 2020 The Authors

                This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

                History
                : 29 October 2019
                : 11 September 2020
                : 16 September 2020
                Categories
                Article

                crop provisioning,environmental accounts,ecosystem services,composite indicators,sustainability scoreboards

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