An ex-ante integrated assessment system for European agricultural and environmental polices (SEAMLESS) – a new role for agronomy

Martin van Ittersum, Johanna Alkan Olsson, Erling Andersen, Floor Brouwer, Marcello Donatelli, Frank Ewert, Guillermo Flichman, Lennart Olsson, Andrea Rizzoli, Jacques Wery

Enlargement of the EU, WTO negotiations, environmental concern and further productivity increase are some of the driving forces behind a continued need for reforming the EU's agricultural and environmental policies. Such reforms require integrated assessment in terms of their potential economic, environmental and social consequences, before introduction of the policies. SEAMLESS aims at developing an integrated and operational framework (SEAMLESS-IF) which integrates approaches from economic, environmental and social sciences to enable such assessment. The framework must allow the simulation of changes in the main categories of agricultural systems, as driven by technological development, rural development policies, markets (prices) and global change. Contributions of agriculture to sustainable development and multifunctionality will be assessed at different spatial scales from farm to global.

In the development of such integrated framework, agronomists have a key, but also new role to play. A quantitative systems analytical approach is fully targeted at enabling integration with economic, environmental and social sciences. This puts obvious constaints on the level of detail and abstraction of agronomic knowledge. It also requires the use of an advanced software architecture to ensure a true modular approach in which agronomic components can be re-used to quantify agro-ecological processes in bio-economic farm models, landscape models and agricultural sector models.

This contribution will introduce the overall concept of SEAMLESS-IF and detail the specific roles of agronomists in this effort with initial results, i.e. the use of indicators, agro-ecological modelling, bio-economic farm modelling and agricultural sector modelling.