Why the discourse on sustainable intensification needs to change

By Joern Fischer

Just a couple of days ago, we highlighted a new paper we published in Frontiers in Ecology & the Environment on the topic of “sustainable intensification”. By coincidence, two new papers on sustainable intensification landed on my desk today. One, a paper by Charles Godfray and Tara Garnett in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, and two, a report by the RISE Foundation called “The sustainable intensification of European Agriculture“. I guess it is fair to say that it is papers such as these two that motivated us in the first place to critically re-appraise sustainable intensification. For those who haven’t read our Frontiers paper: in a nutshell, we argue that intensification without addressing the issue of who benefits from it, and who is involved in the process, cannot legitimately claim to be “sustainable”. The latest two papers I flagged above are emblematic of an analytical frame…