While land serves numerous societal functions and contributes to sustainable development, it is often unclear how these functions are affected by political decisions and common drivers of land use change, such as economic development, climate change and demographic change. This study evaluates...

There is a lack of knowledge about the effectiveness and efficiency of soil conservation policies in agriculture and little understanding of how policy measures should be designed to encourage farmers to adopt soil conservation practices. This paper analyzes institutional settings surrounding...

Long-Term Field Experiments (LTEs) were implemented to study the long-term effects of different management practices, including tillage, fertilization and crop rotation under otherwise constant conditions. Climate change is expected to change these formerly constant conditions, with largely...

This paper presents the results of a sustainability impact assessment (SIA) of policy induced land use changes in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The regional problems include rapid expansions of urban areas, due to high population pressure, and the conversion of paddy fields and forests into...

There is currently no legislation at the European level that focuses exclusively on soil conservation. A cross-policy analysis was carried out to identify gaps and overlaps in existing EU legislation that is related to soil threats and functions. We found that three soil threats, namely...

Agricultural systems in Europe face accumulating economic, ecological and societal challenges, raising concerns about their resilience to shocks and stresses. These resilience issues need to be addressed with a focus on the regional context in which farming systems operate because farms,...

Many farming systems in Europe are struggling to respond to accumulating economic, environmental, institutional and social challenges. From a resilience perspective, they need three distinct capacities to continue delivering products, income and public goods: robustness, adaptability and...

An increasing variety of stresses and shocks provides challenges and opportunities for EU farming systems. This article presents findings of a participatory assessment on the sustainability and resilience of eleven EU farming systems, to inform the design of adequate and relevant strategies and...

Accumulating shocks and long-term stresses, such as trade conflicts, climate change and deteriorating public trust in agricultural practices have raised concerns about the resilience of Europe's diverse farming systems. The SURE-Farm approach aims to systematically assess the resilience...

This chapter assessed sustainability and resilience of eleven farming systems in their current situation, as well as in hypothetical future systems, using qualitative and quantitative methods. The assessment shows that current farming systems address sustainability dimensions in an unbalanced...