Sustainable Intensification Indicators: How Can They be Used for Action?.

Increasing productivity is often the primary goal of many agricultural research and development projects, sometimes but not always at the expense of other domains of sustainability. We have developed guidelines for selecting indicators related to the primary project objectives and interventions, including exercises for highlighting indicators in other domains that may be indirectly affected by the interventions. These indirect relationships can lead to unintended consequences, some of which are positive (synergies) but more often are negative (tradeoffs). The consequences might be realized at spatial scales different from the intervention and/or might be delayed with effects emerging after several years. Understanding the potential causal links and feedbacks among multiple indicators is an important first step in getting stakeholders engaged in sustainability dialogue and exploring what interventions, including policies, might be needed to reduce tradeoffs and enhance synergies. Examples from our research partners demonstrate how they selected indicators at field, farm/household and landscape levels and identified interactions among them. Through the process, they developed plans for applying the indicators to assess the degree of sustainable intensification and guide modifications to their interventions that lead to more sustainable outcomes.