About

Achieving significant progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 risks tradeoffs. However, the Deep Decar­bonisation Pathways Project demonstrated that international co-design of pathways and co-operation towards shared goals could achieve more than nations simply working alone.

TSARA aims to see how far these ideas can be brought into agriculture. Therefore it investigates means to support the development of pathways to delivering to the UN Sustainable De­velopment Goals (SDG, especially SDG2) and targets.

Results

TSARA organised workshops to obtain the major stakeholders views in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and France of the future of agriculture: desirable goals and targets, pathways to these targets as well as views about possible groups of path­ways in the form of scenarios.

It set up a series of tables, known as dashboards, which record changes in agricultural practice for the last 10 to 20 years, identified current trends, and saw whether they were aligned with the SDGs targets for 2030. When this was not the case, ‘backcasting’ was used: set out the desired future state of agriculture and take steps backward to see the conditions necessary at intermediate dates in order to achieve the targets.

A range of alternative pathways are now being devised to explore the  trade-offs between the delivery of improved food production, better environmental quality and social welfare in the European Union and New Zealand bioecono­mies, as well as the social and political impediments that may come along the way.