Additional in-dices, which address some of the critical aspects of agro- ecological health and vulnerability to disasters, need attention . They include; 1) Environment Vulnerability Index : It is natural disaster threats to farming activity aggravated by the anthropogenic degradative factors. EVI use vulnerability definition in terms of degree of resilience to various hazards/damaging indicators. Pooled weights will pro-vide insight on the vulnerability and suggest measures to enhance resilient mechanisms both for natural and man-made hazards ; 2) Agro-ecosystem Health Index : It includes the evaluation of the land resources, water resources, air quality, functional species richness and gene pools in an agricultural landscape ; 3) Agro-ecology Capital Index : It can include the natural resource capital, traditional knowledge/skills capital at farm level, marketable goods/services capital. In this case, the total asset capital linked to bio-banking process may be assumed positive when the resource payments are re-invested to ensure that capital stock will never decline .
It can include certain incentive me- chanism to bring in required positive change in conservation of agro-biodiversity. It must consider the asset value in terms of uniqueness of functional richness of diversity, rarity, traditional varieties and threatened species conservation efforts across the farms enabling better contested ranking to assign incentives . However, it must have internalized EVI to assess the resilience factor; iv) Environmentally adjusted net Resources Index : Similar to System of Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting ,grow table hydroponic must consider all natural re-sources to assess the net resource capital depreciation due to ex-traction of economic resources and subtraction of the adjusted environmental pressures and destruction forces. Ecological indicators are useful to understand the magnitude of change, amount of exposure to change or degree of response to the exposure . Scientific methods defining comparability, weighting and aggregation are pre-requisites for construction of meaningful sustainability indices. Generic models, which facilitate data inputting and sharing across the disciplines, serve the scientific community to integrate the analyses across the locations . In most of the cases, model based outputs will have limitations when analyzed at the scale of effects-means, where as one can conceive an experimental approach to validate the effect-means based indicators, which are inherently subjective.
Currently used sustain-ability indices in terms of means and effects appear to be arbitrary and lack robust scientific basis to arrive at threshold values . However, the threshold values are not acceptable because of interactive nature of physical and biological factors .Some argue that good indicators should be user derived as well as policy relevant and highly aggregated . However, aggregation methods do not facilitate decision-making due to the ambiguity of single index arising out of various dimensions of sustainability definitive indicators with defined objective and absolute comparable values act as useful tool in construction and operationalization at farm level sustainability analysis. Certain criterion and indicators applicable for establishing the sustainability indicators at farm level are presented in Table 3. Applicability of sustainability principles to landscape scale has significant potential for buffering the off-site consequences of agriculture at regional, watershed and farm level to take advantage of services provided by contiguous natural, semi-natural and restored ecosystems. These contiguous systems provide suitable habitat for pollinators, predators and parasites contributing for better productivity of cropland in a landscape.
Thus, landscape approach must consider overall maintenance of ecosystem services provided by agro-ecology, which can be evaluated on the scale of sustainability indices. Although many indicator-based sustainability monitoring tools have been developed in the last decade but considerably less effort has been made to validate their applicability . Last decade has seen increasing need to address the agricultural developmental issues from the perspective that incorporates social and ecological dimensions. Participatory action research holds the key and has relevance to raise the queries on the intuitive wisdom of stakeholders on sustainable agro-ecological practices . PAR is an adaptive social research through the integration of scientific basis to improve the overall management approach by the stakeholders. Unlike the extension activities, the close interactions in PAR promote broad participation in the research process and supports action leading to satisfying situation. Moreover, it reliably addresses the integral question of linking the eco-logical conservation initiatives as part of the socio-economic development at local scale.