Criterion ‘Cultural and spiritual heritage value features are maintained/increased’

There were no indicators selected to represent this criterion.

VI CONCLUSIONS

VI.1 SAFE

In the last couple of years, the sustainability of agricultural systems has become a major concern for scientists, policy makers, environmental NGOs and farmers. Indeed, it is today widely accepted that successive political reforms and the intensification of agricultural practices might have long term consequences both on the productivity of the sector as well as the availability and quality of natural resources. Therefore, sustainability is now regarded as a crucial property of agricultural systems and its evaluation has become a main challenge for scientists, policy makers and farmers.

SAFE (‘Framework for Assessing Sustainability levels in Belgian agricultural systems’) proposes a means for answering the question ‘how sustainable are agricultural systems in Belgium?’

The SAFE methodology (hierarchical framework, indicator selection procedure & integration procedure) was developed and used to create the SAFE tool. The quality of this method ensures the consistency, soundness and practicability of the tool.

1. The SAFE methodology. It is universal - in the sense that it can be used to assess sustainability levels in other geographical and/or sectorial contexts - and it consists in 3 steps corresponding to chapters 2,3 and 4 of this report:

Step 1 The ‘SAFE hierarchical framework’ (P, C & I) defines the multi-functions that a farm should maintain or enhance in order to be sustainable. It participates to a coherent and consistent formulation of sustainability indicators.

Step 2 The ‘SAFE selection procedure’ allows the determination of a core and coherent list of performing and relevant sustainability indicators (this list being, conversely to the selection procedure, specific to the geographical and sectorial context).

Step 3 The ‘SAFE integration procedure’ aggregates the indicators level by level, all along the P, C & I table and until the final formulation of a global sustainability index ‘SIg’. Moreover, the construction of AMOEBA graphs at each step of the process helps in understanding the results of the sustainability assessment in one or several farms at the same time.

2. The SAFE tool. This instrument allows the assessment of sustainability levels in agricultural systems. It consists in 3 successive steps and is specific to the Belgian agricultural context (Figure 54).

CP/28 – “Framework for Assessing Sustainability Levels in Belgian Agricultural Systems (SAFE)”

SPSD II - Part I - Sustainable production and consumption patterns - Agro-food/General Issues 108/125 Figure 54. The SAFE tool assesses the sustainability level (SIt) of a farm in three steps.

Significant achievements

SAFE provides Belgium for the first time with a tool for measuring sustainability levels in agricultural systems with a holistic approach. The most significant achievements are:

1. An agricultural sustainability assessment that considers the environmental, economic & social pillar

2. A coherent list of performing and relevant sustainability indicators that is the output of a selection based on the knowledge and experience of numerous experts

3. Sustainability indicators are progressively integrated into an overall Sustainability Index. This confers to the results of the sustainability assessment a certain ease of interpretation and use. It also provides SAFE with polyvalence: while scientists are expected to pay more attention to indicators, other stakeholders and policy makers will find in Sustainability Indices a decent means for communication and decision making

4. An agricultural sustainability assessment at three spatial levels: (1) parcel (2) farm and (3) landscape. Only a few studies deal with sustainability at field or farm level. Rather, they focus on national or international levels. Our approach makes the important link between farm management and its impacts on sustainability possible.

Future improvements

Despite the progress accomplished in the definition of sustainability indicators by SAFE, it would be naïve to believe it is an accomplished tool. It can certainly be improved:

1. The list of indicators selected is quite exhaustive, mainly because of the will to cover ‘all’ aspects lying behind the concept of agricultural sustainability. This has two consequences: (a) the application in practice of SAFE is time-consuming; (b) the calculation and the interpretation of all selected indicators require much competency in many different domains. Therefore, applying SAFE at a large scale (in terms of number of agricultural systems) will imply a shorter list of selected indicators, a standardization of both data collection and indicator calculation and collaboration between scientists.

2. Two crucial points will require further exploration in future research: the definition of normalisation functions and the determination of the respective weights of the indicators within each Criterion.

These two elements are at the core of SAFE and therefore deserve to be defined with ‘state of the art’ techniques.

indicators is collected Ö Raw data

3. ‘It is logically impossible to evaluate the contribution of a strategy (i.e. a given agricultural practice) to agricultural sustainability when adherence to that approach has already been used as a criterion for evaluating sustainability’ (Hansen, 1996). In the SAFE framework, many means-based indicators²⁵ are included and used to assess agricultural sustainability (e.g. proportion of the AA under organic farming contract, proportion of the AA under M.A.E. contract, tillage pressure…). If one plans to use SAFE to identify locally more appropriate strategies (e.g. compare organic to conventional farming), these indicators should be carefully ejected of the SAFE framework in order to avoid circular logic.

4. So far, SAFE has implemented for each criterion a series of indicators and for some indicators a series of verifiers has been proposed. In some cases, alternative verifiers can be proposed for an indicator or alternative indicators for a criterion. Differences in assessment may be expected if different verifiers and indicators are used. Therefore, a need exist to validate the indicator selection and calculation procedure (i.e. the verifier definition). This could be done by indicator inter-comparison programs, intensive sensitivity analysis, robustness analysis of indicator calculation procedure, etc.

5. Facilitating indicator calculations by developing an appropriate DSS tools (Decision Support System). Within SAFE, a prototype of an integrated assessment tool was designed and tested on 4 Belgian farms. Yet, the final assessment needed an intensive and labor intensive phase of data collection, data structuring, modeling, interpretation and aggregation. The actual proto-type does not allow to asses sustainability level at larger spatial scales and smaller time spans. Therefore, a need exist to integrate the data collection and indicator calculation procedures into operational decision support systems. Such systems should be based on a critical analysis of data quality and data processing procedures, with a particular attention to the propagation of the uncertainty into the final assessment. These systems should be based on efficient state of the art data handling and information processing technology.