Conclusion
The environmental change caused worldwide by the decoupling of energy
flows and land uses urges societies to recover the former ‘landscape
efficiency’, i.e. the socio-economic satisfaction of human needs while
maintaining the landscape ecological functionality needed to ensure
ecosystem services of all types (48 ). Depending on the energy
storage-distribution (E ·I ), and how these energy flows are
imprinted in the landscape (L ), agroecosystems may either enhance
or decrease biodiversity (40 ). Since the lack of an integrated
management of energy flows and land-uses is part of the current global
ecological crisis, its recovery becomes crucial for sustainable
human-transformed landscapes. As Margalef suggested (31 ),
‘the patterns of energy distribution ’ shaped by farmer’s
knowledge (i.e. the distribution of energy flows according to an aim)
and labour (i.e. the energy investments to maintain the agroecosystem’s
funds along time) have been determinant to understand
the locations of bird and
butterfly species richness and abundance in Mediterranean cultural
landscapes.
The landscape scale is crucial for managing the challenge of
increasing agricultural production
while improving the state of the environment through a climate-smart and
resilient farming transition. Neither agroecological intensification nor
the application of a circular economy to agriculture will be possible
without a rearrangement of the landscape complexity that allows closing
their main biophysical cycles and improving their ecoefficiency. This
innovative line of research aims at contributing to the economic and
environmental viability of scaling up organic agriculture, and of
agriculture in general. This is viable through the sustainable design of
human-transformed landscapes that allow closing the socio-metabolic
cycles, reducing non-external inputs dependence, and improving
ecological processes to maintain biodiversity.