Assessing the energy trap of industrial agriculture in North America and Europe: 82 balances from 1830 to 2012.

Unlabelled: Early energy analyses of agriculture revealed that behind higher labor and land productivity of industrial farming, there was a decrease in energy returns on energy (EROI) invested, in comparison to more traditional organic agricultural systems. Studies on recent trends show that efficiency gains in production and use of inputs have again somewhat improved energy returns. However, most of these agricultural energy studies have focused only on external inputs at the crop level, concealing the important role of internal biomass flows that livestock and forestry recirculate within agroecosystems.

Displaying geographic variability of peri-urban agriculture environmental impacts in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona: A regionalized life cycle assessment.

Peri urban agriculture (peri-UA) can supply food locally and potentially more sustainably than far-away conventional agricultural systems. It can also introduce significant environmental impacts depending on the local biophysical conditions and resources required to implement it and, on the crops managing practices, which could vary widely among growers. Sophisticated methods to account for such variability while assessing direct (on-site) and indirect (up/down stream) environmental impacts of peri-UA implementation are thus needed.

Assessing the sustainability of contrasting land use scenarios through the Socioecological Integrated Analysis (SIA) of the metropolitan green infrastructure in Barcelona.

Urban development and the sprawl of transport infrastructures have disregarded the crucial function of metropolitan landscape in provisioning human well-being and biodiversity. This research aims to contribute to the challenges of Planning for Sustainability by proposing a Socioecological Integrated Analysis (SIA) to support the Land Use Master Plan in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area, to conciliate urban development with the performance of surrounding open spaces. The paper evaluates four different land cover scenarios (current, trending, alternative and potential), and two kinds of agricultural management (conventional and a socioecological transition towards organic agriculture).

An energy-landscape integrated analysis to evaluate agroecological scarcity.

Agrarian landscapes theoretically provide ecosystem services that meet the demands of a wide range of socioecological processes. Consequently, any landscape agroecology approach must tackle the dynamic interaction of land-use distribution and associated social metabolism at different spatiotemporal scales. An agroecological scarcity case study explores how driven agricultural energy flows interact with landscape complexity in arid landscapes of 46 counties in the Qazvin Province (Iran).

Agroecosystem energy transitions in the old and new worlds: trajectories and determinants at the regional scale.

Energy efficiency in biomass production is a major challenge for a future transition to sustainable food and energy provision. This study uses methodologically consistent data on agroecosystem energy flows and different metrics of energetic efficiency from seven regional case studies in North America (USA and Canada) and Europe (Spain and Austria) to investigate energy transitions in Western agroecosystems from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. We quantify indicators such as external final energy return on investment (EFEROI, i.