Adrian Muller

Forschungsinstitut für biologischen Landbau | FiBL · Socio-Economics

Agricultural landscapes are multifunctional and closely connected to the much wider food system. In our review, we explore three specific aspects of modelling approaches for agricultural landscape assessments: (a) how multifunctionality is commonly analysed to support decision-making for sustainable agricultural land management; (b) how the modelli...

Bioenergy from energy crops is a source of negative emissions and carbon-neutral fuels in many 1.5/2◦C IPCC pathways. This may compete with other land uses. In contrast, ancillary biomass like by-products and waste is not primarily grown for energy and thus without land/food/feed competition. Here, we examine the availability and environmental impa...

Welche Mehrleistungen erbringt der ökologische Landbau im Vergleich zur konventionellen Produktion für die Umwelt? Über diese Frage wird in der Öffentlichkeit immer wieder kontrovers diskutiert[1-4]. Die unterschiedlichen Perspektiven auf den ökologischen Landbau lassen sich vornehmlich auf drei Aspekte zurückführen. Erstens, besteht in Europa mit...

Transforming the global food system is necessary to avoid exceeding planetary boundaries. A robust evidence base is crucial to assess the scale and combination of interventions required for a sustainable transformation. We developed a risk assessment framework, underpinned by a meta-regression of 60 global food system modeling studies, to quantify...

The aim of this study was to analyze the acceptance of different policy measures affecting meat consumption in Switzerland. We conducted qualitative interviews with leading stakeholders and elaborated 37 policy measures for reducing meat consumption. In a standardized survey, we analyzed the acceptance of these measures and important preconditions...

Biomass is a growing renewable energy source in Europe and is envisioned to play a role for realising carbon neutrality, predominantly using dedicated energy crops. However, dedicated biomass is controversial for reasons including its competition with food production or its land-use and emissions impacts. Here we examine the potential role of a lan...

The European Commission recently embraced the concept of agroecology as a pathway to reduce negative impacts from agri‐food systems on the environment. So far, it remains unclear whether agroecology can deliver on these high hopes if implemented on a large scale. We here assess socio‐economic and environmental implications of multiple agroecologica...

Successful transitions to agroecology require shared understanding of the sustainability implications of transitions for food systems. To gain such understanding, a transdisciplinary approach is increasingly called for by funders, end users of research and scientists. Transdisciplinary processes were used in the UNISECO project to develop strategic...

Agroecology has been proposed as a strategy to improve food system sustainability, but has also been criticised for using land inefficiently. We compared five explorative storylines, developed in a stakeholder process, for future food systems in the EU to 2050. We modelled a range of biophysical (e.g., land use and food production), environmental (...

Background National food-based dietary guidelines (FBDGs) are generally designed from a human health perspective and often disregard sustainability aspects. Circular food production systems are a promising solution to achieve sustainable healthy diets. In such systems, closing nutrient cycles where possible and minimising external inputs contribute...

A debate has emerged over the potential socio-ecological drivers of wildlife-origin zoonotic disease outbreaks and emerging infectious disease (EID) events. This Review explores the extent to which the incidence of wildlife-origin infectious disease outbreaks, which are likely to include devastating pandemics like HIV/AIDS and COVID-19, may be link...

CONTEXT Eco-efficiency offers a promising approach for the sustainable intensification of production systems in Sub-Saharan Africa. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), which is widely used for eco-efficiency analyses, is however sensitive to outliers and the analysis of the influence of external factors in the second stage requires the separability as...

In this chapter we discuss how methodological choices can lead to different solutions when assessing land use. We focus on the following three methodologies: Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Land Use Ratio (LUR), and the food systems approach. Each method has its own strengths. LCA offers the best estimates of how we should change our diets at the marg...

Background To improve the sustainability performance of food systems, consumption- as well as production-side changes are needed. Objective To this end, we assessed multiple sustainability impacts of six consumer strategies for Switzerland. Design Two strategies encompassed dietary changes: following a pescetarian diet and adhering to the nationa...

The potential of organic agriculture and agroecological approaches for improving food security in Africa is a controversial topic in global discussions. While there is a number of meta-analyses on the environmental, agronomic and financial performance of organic farming, most of the underlying data stems from on-station field trials from temperate...

Certification in agriculture ensures compliance with tangible standards and should generate economic opportunities for farmers. This study quantifies the variable profit and efficiency impacts of organic certification in dairy farming across Europe, using farm‐level FADN data from 25 countries while accounting for heterogeneity through a class spli...

While the production of food causes major environmental impacts and poses social risks, consumption of healthy and nutritious food is essential for human wellbeing. Against this background, action to make current diets more sustainable is needed, which in turn requires knowledge on possibilities for improvement. In this study, we investigated how s...

The alignment of the environmental, economic and social sustainability of farms is necessary for enhancing the provision of public goods in farming. This study combines the use of three tools for the assessment of farm sustainability. It provides first insights into the sustainability performance of farms at different stages of agro-ecological tran...

The European Commission's Farm to Fork (F2F) Strategy sets ambitious targets to transform the whole food system towards greater sustainability, but we are critical about its strong focus on technical innovations while neglecting the social and structural aspects in transforming food systems. Also, the target of 25 per cent of EU's agricultural land...

Agro-ecological approaches are fundamental for sustainable food production in the future, and the overarching objective of UNISECO is to co-develop improved and practice-validated strategies and incentives for the promotion of improved agro-ecological approaches. The key dilemma is how to produce public goods whilst maintaining viable production of...

Food systems have increasingly strong impacts on the environment, and they influence our human well‐being. In Switzerland, food consumption accounts for one‐third of the environmental impact caused by total final consumption. At the same time, non‐communicable diseases have been linked to a number of dietary aspects. In Switzerland, all non‐communi...

Agroecology increasingly gains importance in the discussion about sustainable food systems. To facilitate the transition from conventional farming to agroecological farming, adequate methods and concepts to measure and assess impact and productivity of agroecological farming systems (AFSs) are needed, which consider their multifunctionality and oth...

https://www.agroecology-pool.org/climatechangereport/ Robust scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecology increases climate resilience. Success factors for this are that agroecology builds on: a) ecological principles, in particular on biodiversity, overall diversity and healthy soils (meta-analysis and case studies results) b) social aspects,...

Grazing systems emit greenhouse gases, which can, under specific agro-ecological conditions, be partly or entirely offset by soil carbon sequestration. However, any sequestration is time-limited, reversible, and at a global level outweighed by emissions from grazing systems. Thus, grazing systems are globally a net contributor to climate change and...

Much scientific literature proposes reduction of animal-source foods to reduce environmental impacts of the food system. However, these dietary solutions differ regarding level and type of animal-source foods. We review this literature and our results show that these differences relate to differences in employed methodological approaches. Approache...

Major common production activities on organic soils require drainage, which results in the loss of important ecosystem services such as carbon storage. This paper provides an overview of the farming situation on organic soils in a western region of Switzerland characterized by intensive vegetable farming and therefore by high opportunity costs of a...

Agricultural practices need to change to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. How to achieve the SDGs is heavily contested. Here we propose a policy framework that triggers the required transition. Organic agriculture, although not a silver bullet, is a useful component in such strategy.

Agricultural innovation is an essential component in the transition to more sustainable and resilient farming systems across the world. Innovations generally emerge from collective intelligence and action, but innovation systems are often poorly understood. This study explores the properties of innovation systems and their contribution to increased...

Consumption of animal-source food is criticised, among other reasons, for its relatively high environmental impact. It is, however, increasingly acknowledged that livestock can contribute to nutrition security if they upcycle low-opportunity-cost feed (LCF) – food waste, food processing by-products and grass resources – into nutritious animal-sourc...

This paper introduces an approach for separately quantifying the contributions from renewables in decomposition analysis. So far, decomposition analyses of the drivers of national CO2 emissions have typically considered the combined energy mix as an explanatory factor without an explicit consideration or separation of renewables. As the cost of ren...

The need for more sustainable production and consumption of animal‐source food is central to the achievement of the sustainable development goals: within this context, wise use of land is a core challenge and concern. A key question in feeding the future world is: how much animal‐source food should we eat? We demonstrate that livestock raised under...

Organic farming (OF) enhances top soil organic carbon ( SOC ) stocks in croplands compared with conventional farming (CF), which can contribute to sequester C. As farming system differences in the amount of C inputs to soil (e.g. fertilization and crop residues) are not enough to explain such increase, shifts in crop residue traits important for so...

The application of microbial inoculants (biofertilizers) is a promising technology for future sustainable farming systems in view of rapidly decreasing phosphorus stocks and the need to more efficiently use available nitrogen (N). Various microbial taxa are currently used as biofertilizers, based on their capacity to access nutrients from fertilize...

Study list used for meta-analysis.

Data used for meta-analysis.

Prisma flow diagram of the literature search.

Funnel plots of the change in yield of (A) tropical climate (B) dry climate (C) continental climate (D) oceanic climate. Mean difference of yield on the horizontal axis is plotted against their corresponding standard errors (SE) on the vertical axis.

Agriculture faces huge challenges regarding sustainable use of soils and its sustainability performance in general. There are three different approaches to sustainable agricultural production commonly proposed, namely intensification, agro-ecological approaches and high-tech industrial approaches. Often, some propose that only agro-ecological appro...

Organic agriculture is proposed as a promising approach to achieving sustainable food systems, but its feasibility is also contested. We use a food systems model that addresses agronomic characteristics of organic agriculture to analyze the role that organic agriculture could play in sustainable food systems. Here we show that a 100% conversion to...

The report dissects claims made by different stakeholders in the debate about so called ‘grass-fed’ beef, the greenhouse gases the animals emit, and the possibility that, through their grazing actions, they can help remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It evaluates these claims and counterclaims against the best available science, providing a...

Ruminants play a key role in organic systems, due to their ability to use grassland resources, legumes from crop rotations and crop residues, and to supply manure for the soil. Grassland-based milk production therefore is likely to be the most sustainable system for dairy cattle in organic agriculture. However, digestion of fibre is a prominent sou...

A recent study by McGee (Agriculture and Human Values, 32, 255–263, 2015) from the University of Oregon has led to discussions in international media and on the web. This study addresses an interesting question and applies advanced statistics for its analysis. However, we identify several methodological flaws that invalidate the results. First, McG...

Payments for environmental services (PES) have gained wide popularity as approaches to promote environmentally friendly land use or agricultural production practices. Yet academics have also voiced concerns against seeing PES as a panacea. This article discusses whether PES is an appropriate and promising approach to promote so-called “climate-smar...

Sufficiency is not a goal of environmental policy-making as is efficiency. In view of the planetary boundaries, this paper instead proposes that sufficiency should amend the notion of liberal society. The classic vision of liberal societies has been based on the core values of individual freedom, the no-harm principle and social justice together wi...

When trying to optimize the sustainability performance of farms and farming systems, a consideration of trade-offs and synergies between different themes and dimensions is required. The aim of this paper is to perform a systematic analysis of trade-offs and synergies across all dimensions and themes. To achieve this aim we used the Sustainability M...

Increasing efficiency in livestock production and reducing the share of animal products in human consumption are two strategies to curb the adverse environmental impacts of the livestock sector. Here, we explore the room for sustainable livestock production by modelling the impacts and constraints of a third strategy in which livestock feed compone...

Bioenergy is one option to mitigate climate change in the energy sector. Sustainable bioenergy however faces several challenges. First, there is a widely discussed land competition between food and bioenergy crops. Second, there is a widely neglected competition for biomass between using it as a fertilizer for sustainable agriculture or as feedstoc...

The biggest mitigation potential of agriculture lies in soil carbon sequestration. The most promising practices for this, such as the use of legume leys and organic fertilisers, are common to organic agriculture, thus suggesting considerable mitigation potential for this farming system. However, mitigation in agriculture needs to be assessed beyond...

Agriculture contributes to climate change and at the same time has a huge climate change mitigation potential - this lies mainly in increased soil carbon sequestration. This article discusses the mitigation potential of soil carbon sequestration, the underlying processes and main challenges for its utilization. There are difficulties of reliable qu...

Approximately one-third of all food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted. The economic costs of this food wastage are substantial and amount to about USD 1 trillion each year. However, the hidden costs of food wastage extend much further. Food that is produced, but never consumed, still causes environmental impacts to the atmosphere, wa...

In recent years, progress has been made globally in establishing sustainable food production systems aimed at improving food and nutrition security and the judicial use of natural resources. Yet, all of those efforts are in vain when the food produced in those systems is lost or wasted and never consumed. As food wastage increases in parallel with...

In their letter, Leifeld et al. (1) argue that our metaanalysis to identify differences in soil organic carbon (SOC) between organic (OF) and nonorganic farming [conventional farming (CF)] (2) selected CF systems that were nonrepresentative. This was not the case. We included data from all available pairwise field comparisons between OF and CF iden...

It has been suggested that conversion to organic farming contributes to soil carbon sequestration, but until now a comprehensive quantitative assessment has been lacking. Therefore, datasets from 74 studies from pairwise comparisons of organic vs. nonorganic farming systems were subjected to metaanalysis to identify differences in soil organic carb...