Short description of the best practice

The Sustainability and Landscape Vulnerability Agri-Environmental Indicator. The overarching goal of the Sustainability and Landscape Vulnerability (SLV) Agri-Environmental Indicator (AEI) is to provide information that supports the sustainable use of Canada’s agricultural landscapes.  Conceptually, the SLV-AEI will be an assessment of the loss and gain of the ability of the agricultural land resource to provide for the needs of future generations.  There are three aspects to SLV-AEI: the state of natural capital of Canada’s agricultural land with respect to its capabilities to meet the needs of future generations, the susceptibility to loss of that natural capital, and the past and present occurrence of loss or gain in that natural capital due to land use and management.  The SLV-AEI is intended primarily to aid evaluation and development of national, provincial, and sub-provincial policy for agriculture and land use.  To organize the work and provide insight into the underlying processes within the above land sustainability concept, the work is divided into a number of indicators that will be combined into a holistic Sustainability and Land Vulnerability Agri-Environmental Indicator AEI.  The individual component indicators include:
-Risk of soil salinization
-Soil cover
-Soil degradation
-Wind erosion
-Water erosion   
-Tillage erosion
-Integrated erosion
-Soil organic matter