The Agroecological Way to Ecosystem Services and Sustainable Developmental Goals

Dear Colleagues,

Agriculture is pivotal for the policies aimed at fostering sustainability and socioecological resilience, in line with the frame tailored by the Ecosystem Millennium Assessment (EMA, ecosystem services’ concept) and by the Sustainable Development Goals (UN, SDGs). Currently, 70% of the rural activities in the world are covered by farming systems of a small-medium size. Many of these are family farming systems, which are especially seen to provide a consistent amount of food and commodities while ensuring fundamental ecosystem services. Most often, such systems are planned for multifunctional purposes and pay much attention to conservation agriculture, agroforestry and diversification of crops and non-food products. In addition, there is the key component of biodiversity preservation along with the adoption of agroecological practices. Furthermore, given that their features are disposed to the intergenerational viability, family farming systems are likely better enabled to promote local uniqueness, thus producing an indigenous heritage of locally designed solutions, practices, and knowledge sharing. With reference to the interrelated biotic and abiotic crises that humanity faces and is facing (e.g., the impacts of climate change and the COVID-19 epidemic), various studies suggest a higher socioecological resilience for those anthropic systems where the common characteristics are diversity, synergy, efficiency, recycling, co-creation and sharing of knowledge, human and social values, culture and food traditions, responsible governance, circular and solidarity economies. These are certainly the keywords that the FAO adopts in identifying the agroecological approach, although scientific research on the real potentialities of agroecology is lacking and mostly confined to the grey literature and to the empiricism of applied experiences. This lack of information seems particularly true of scales of ecological complexity larger than the ecosystem or the farm, requiring focused scientific efforts on the landscape and regional levels to meet two major aims: 1) increasing our holistic comprehension of socioecological systems; and 2) empowering the communities towards effective, locally-based capacity building processes, in order to implement more resilient, environmentally friendly, and socially fair systems.

In order to accomplish these aims, the present Special Issue aims to highlight the state of the art in our present capability to understand and apply the agroecological approach in real life. Particularly, it seems important to engage scientific contributions covering the full range of basic aspects for a sound handling of the agroecology discipline. Such an effective handling must meet the recognition of the following: the common characteristics of agroecological systems as well their foundational practices and innovation approaches; the context features referring to a unique indigenous blend of environment and culture; the enabling environment made of responsible governance and circular and solidarity economies, elements which are fundamental to any sustainability target. Contributions covering and/or addressing one or more of these themes will be most welcome, and surely, beneficial to human ideals in general.

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• climate change
• land-use change
• soil fertility
• water-energy-food nexus
• farming systems
• socio-ecological systems
• sustainability
• resilience
• food security and safety
• biotic, abiotic and socioecological crises