Sustainability frameworks: Key takeaways from an interdisciplinary graduate student workshop

There is urgency in the need to transform our global agriculture systems to achieve food security, resiliency, equity, and environmental sustainability. Yet frameworks for achieving these goals – for example, agroecology, sustainable intensification, etc. – often have significant differences in the ways they define sustainability challenges, and the pathways they envisage to work towards solving these challenges. Despite intense interest and passion surrounding each of these sustainability frameworks, agricultural transformation towards more sustainable systems has been incremental. We think that the academic community has an opportunity and responsibility to accelerate agricultural transformation by cultivating meaningful alliances across sustainability frameworks and across disciplines, to work together towards shared goals. Collaborating across these frameworks can be challenging, especially when researchers aligning themselves with different frameworks do not share a common worldview. However, there are certain outcomes that we think most can agree are desirable (e.g. increased food security, improved livelihoods, and reduced environmental degradation) and there IS a sense of urgency to transform agriculture systems at scale and in a variety of contexts. In this spirit, a group of eight graduate students from three disciplines – agronomy, development sociology, and animal science – came together over the course of the semester to compare four sustainability frameworks, namely agroecology, sustainable intensification, climate-smart agriculture, and regenerative agriculture. In this panel, we will give an overview of the key takeaways from our discussions and pose questions to the audience to encourage what we hope will be a lively conversation. It is our hope that this will be just the beginning of a deepening of interdisciplinary engagement within CALS around defining shared sustainability goals, and how we can work together towards those goals, making use of all of our varied experiences, methods, and disciplinary knowledge.

About the series:
The Soil and Crops Science Section of the School of Integrative Plant Science holds a weekly seminar on Thursdays. This seminar is co-sponsored by the Department of Global Development

About the speakers: 
- Kiera Crowley, soil and crop sciences
- Emily Urban, soil and crop sciences
- Valentina Rubio, soil and crop sciences
- David Bluhm, soil and crop sciences
- Sidney Madsen, development sociology
- Emily Baker, development sociology
- Rink Tacoma-Fogal, animal science
- Agustin Olivo, animal science
- Max Wohlgemuth, global development