Assessing the sustainability of agriculture at the planning stage

This paper reviews the current state of knowledge in defining sustainable agriculture within the broader sphere of sustainable development. We conclude that agricultural sustainability encompasses biophysical, economic and social factors operating at the field, farm, watershed, regional and national scales. The immediate challenge is to determine what are sustainable agricultural uses before they are implemented—at the planning stage. The final section outlines a framework within which current land evaluation, environmental impact and strategic environmental assessment approaches to land use planning may be extended, and argues that these approaches must include, from the beginning, sustainability criteria. The framework for integrated sustainability assessment encompasses a mosaic of factors and hierarchy of scales important to agricultural sustainability. The keys to this framework are characterizing sustainability indicator groups and identifying «threats» to sustainable practice. In this way, the framework can be seen as a guide for unsustainability assessment using indicators.