A study led by Professor Huang Kai's team at Beijing Forestry University's School of Environmental Science has been published in Environmental Science & Technology (ES&T) under the title "Addressing Regional Agro-Ecological Boundaries: An Integrated Environmental Footprint Framework for Revealing Sustainability Gaps in Agroecosystems". The research was also featured as the journal's cover article. The team developed an innovative 'Footprint-AEB Integrated Framework,' which systematically assesses agricultural environmental risks across multiple dimensions, offering new insights into sustainability gaps in agroecosystems.

Overexploiting ecosystems to meet growing food demands threatens global agricultural sustainability and food security. Addressing these challenges requires solutions tailored to regional agro-ecological boundaries (AEBs) and overall agro-ecological risks. Here, the team proposed a globally consistent and regionally adapted approach for quantifying regional AEBs. Based on this approach, they developed a region-specific integrated Footprint-AEB framework that combines six environmental footprints (EFs) with AEBs to capture the overall environmental impacts on China's regional agro-ecosystems. Results indicate that individual EFs cannot reliably reveal the complexity of agro-ecological stressors without comprehensive assessment relative to regionally determined boundaries. For example, Northwest China faces higher water boundary stress despite lower water footprints compared to Central China, and regions such as Qinghai and Ningxia exhibit higher integrated AEB stress driven by combined water, land, and biodiversity stresses. Additionally, imbalanced integrated AEB stress transfer via trade, mainly from industrialized eastern to vulnerable western regions, is identified as a key driver of AEB exceedance in Northwest China. This fosters a nuanced understanding of environmental responsibility and equity. The integrated Footprint-AEB framework provides new insights into agro-ecosystem dynamics and supports targeted interventions to avoid shifting environmental stressors. These challenges confront agro-ecosystems worldwide.

Led by PhD candidate Wu Linxiu from the School of Environment Science with Professor Huang from the same college as corresponding author, this international collaboration involved researchers from Beijing Institute of Technology, Tsinghua University, and Australia's CSIRO. Beijing Forestry University is the signature unit of the first author.

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (52370190).

Link: https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.4c08025

Written by Wu Linxiu
Translated and edited by Song He
Reviewed by Yu Yangyang