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.