Deliverable Report D3.1 Report on environmental, economic and social performance of current AEFS, and comparison to conventional baseline

The overall aim of the UNISECO project is to provide recommendations on how the sustainability of agro-ecological farming systems (AEFS) in Europe can be promoted. These recommendations build upon multi-actor engagement and practice-validated strategies. The project explores both of these approaches in 15 case studies across Europe. Every case study reflects an AEFS at a certain point of transition towards agro-ecological farming systems. A first step in all of the case studies was to characterize the status quo of the farm systems. Along with other methods to describe the status quo, three decision support tools (DST) were applied in the case studies to provide information on the environmental, economic and social performance of current AEFS. The tools applied were COMPAS, an economic performance assessment tool, Cool Farm Tool, a greenhouse gas inventory tool, and SMART, a multidimensional sustainability tool. This deliverable presents the overall approach taken to assess the farms along the agro-ecological transition, describes the tools, and presents results from their application in the case studies. In each case study area, the project partners defined pathways of agro-ecological transitions. Different stages of achievement of the agro-ecological transition characterized these pathways: stage 0 (not agro-ecological) served as the conventional baseline with which comparisons could be made. The subsequent stages defined represented states along the ecological transition pathway on a continuum from weak agro-ecological to strong agro-ecological (Prazan and Aalders, 2019), whereas strong agro-ecological represented a redesign of a system...