Linking social metabolism with socioecohydrology in the study of the sustainability of agricultural production in Spain: a methodological approach

The agricultural sector is challenged to meet the global food needs of mankind and reduce its environmental impacts. It is well known that the industrialisation of agriculture has led to negative effects such as water pollution, increased erosion, loss of biodiversity, increased zoonotic diseases, high water consumption to the detriment of ecosystem needs and other users, and greenhouse gas emissions, among others.

However, the proposition and implementation of adequate solutions for these environmental issues are still limited by the epistemological challenge posed by the complexity of socio-ecological processes associated with food production at different spatial and temporal scales. To that respect, different approaches have emerged such as social metabolism, the water-energy-food nexus, coupled social-natural or socio-environmental systems analysis, socio-ecohydrology, hydro-social and socio-hydrological approaches, life cycle assessment, ecological footprint (water footprint and virtual water), energy and matter flow analysis, extended environmental input-output analysis, among others. However, in our opinion, such approaches usually do not address the complex relations between agricultural production and the water cycle, nor the effects of the socio-economic and political context on the biogeochemical cycles, although they are fundamental in the processes occurring in agroecosystems, and their environmental impacts. The present methodological proposal makes a novel integration of approaches from the social sciences (social metabolism) with those from the earth sciences (socioecohydrology) to incorporate such cycles in the analysis of historical metabolic patterns and possible future trajectories of agroecosystems.

We start with the Agrarian Metabolism approach developed and tested for the metabolic analysis of agriculture in Spain in contemporary history. This methodological core is enriched, including estimations of blue, green, grey and virtual water, estimated through hydrological spatiotemporal-explicit modelling. From this integration, progress is made in the tailoring of new metabolic indicators that account for the thermodynamic cost of landscape alteration over time, as well as the energy efficiency of agroecosystems.

Southern Spanish (Andalusian) is an important agrarian region, accounting for ~17% of the cultivated area of Spain, presenting different types of agriculture, such as olive orchards (main Spanish producer), greenhouse vegetables, paddy rice, and berries, and also exemplifying diverse water-related environmental problems´ associated to the agricultural production. Thus, the industrialization process of Andalusian agriculture, in the period 1951-2018, is taken as a case study. For the analysis of possible future trajectories, climate change scenarios modelled for the Spanish territory as well as different agroecological management scenarios will be analysed. Hence, this proposal is useful for understanding the effects of agriculture in contemporary history, particularly in its industrialisation phase and, also, the expected results will serve as a scientific basis for decision-making on future actions in the territory and as a tool for analysing different types of scenarios and their comparison with patterns already observed in the recent past.