Towards Sustainable Pasture Agrolandscapes: Comparison
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Please note this is a comparison between Version 2 by Catherine Yang and Version 1 by Kai Zhu.

Reliable environmental audits and impact assessments are essential to achieve effective pasture utilization and ensure the production of high-quality livestock products. Pasture agrolandscapes are complex and dynamic systems that involve the interaction of various components, such as soil, vegetation, climate, and land use. These landscapes are crucial not only for the production of high-quality livestock products but also for maintaining environmental health and providing ecosystem services

  • environmental audit
  • impact assessment
  • pasture agrolandscapes
  • sustainable livestock practices

1. Pasture Agrolandscapes

Agrolandscape is a natural-territorial complex that, as a whole, preserves the natural regime of the dynamics in all processes, although it has been modified by economic measures to create highly productive agrobiocenoses [19,20,21,22,23,24][1][2][3][4][5][6]. Pasture agrolandscapes are formed for grazing or haymaking. Their characteristic and most important feature is the constant vegetation cover and certain phytocenotic parameters that are regulated by humans [16,25,26,27][7][8][9][10]. Spatial structure optimization of pasture agrolandscapes implies a certain ratio of grassy, forest protected and other geocomplexes, which are correctly placed from the viewpoint of landscape ecology [28][11]. Among the technological methods, the regulation of surface runoff [29][12], crop rotations [30][13], methods of crop cultivation [31][14], special methods of tillage [32][15], increased soil infiltration [33][16], fertilizers [34][17], equipment and terms for their application, land reclamation and others can be used. It is necessary to carry out measures for improving the soil fertility of pastures, which are focused on the humus state, water-air and water-physical property regimes, acid-base properties and many others [35][18].
Agrolandscape is a natural-territorial complex that, as a whole, preserves the natural regime of dynamics in all processes, although it has been modified by economic measures to create highly productive agrobiocenoses [19,20][1][2]. Pasture agrolandscapes are formed for grazing or haymaking. Their characteristic and most important feature is the constant vegetation cover and specific phytocenotic parameters that are regulated by humans [16,25,26,27][7][8][9][10]. Spatial structure optimization of pasture agrolandscapes implies a certain ratio of grassy, forest-protected, and other geocomplexes, which are correctly placed from the viewpoint of landscape ecology [28][11]. Among the technological methods, the regulation of surface runoff [29][12], crop rotations [30][13], methods of crop cultivation [31][14], special methods of tillage [32][15], increased soil infiltration [33][16], fertilizers [34][17], equipment, and terms for their application, land reclamation, and others can be used. It is necessary to carry out measures to improve the soil fertility of pastures, which focus on the humus state, water-air and water-physical property regimes, acid-base properties, and many others [35][18].

2. Landscape-Ecological and Landscape-Indicative Approaches

The landscape environment is the shell of the Earth, encompassing natural, natural-anthropogenic, and anthropogenic territorial landscapes (geocomplexes) with all their interrelationships and possessing several special properties [36,37,38][19][20][21]. One such property is the landscape-ecological state, which is an integral characteristic of the anthropogenic impact effects on geocomplexes based on an assessment of the degree of equilibrium for internal properties (including individual components) and information about the conditions of ecological existence [39,40,41,42,43][22][23][24][25][26].
The use of the landscape as a tool for environmentally safe territorial development is a multidisciplinary direction in modern geography that employs various measures to determine optimal control mechanisms for specific landscape parameters. For successful agricultural production, it is essential to allocate territories with distinct quality properties [44,45][27][28]. Landscape-indicative typification divides a territory based on the principle of uniformity for landscape-indicative parameters or ecological state, as well as the nature of economic use [46][29]. Special landscape-ecological zoning is required to regulate the diversity of natural conditions and ecological states of pasture areas [43,47,48,49,50][26][30][31][32][33]. This zoning involves the optimal placement of different pasture types on a regional scale (macrozoning), administrative districts (mesozoning), and cattle-breeding farms (microzoning). The fundamental principles of zoning include an integrated approach to analyzing all landscape-ecological factors related to agricultural production, optimal and differentiated land use, and the appropriate selection of cultivated plant species, taking into account the current ecological state of geocomplexes. Additionally, it includes the separation of landscape-ecological complexes according to the degree of ecological destabilization risk, typification of geocomplexes for managing anthropogenic load, and the value of geocomplexes from the perspective of social demand for the quantity of livestock products for the population [51,52,53][34][35][36]. An essential component of landscape-ecological zoning is the landscape-ecological skeleton, which serves as the basis for integrating diverse approaches for creating landscape and environmentally balanced models of pasture land use and management forms [6,54][37][38]. Finally, a separate economic regime is determined for each geocomplex based on its role in maintaining environmental sustainability [55,56,57][39][40][41].

3. Interaction between the Environmental Audit and Impact Assessment in Kazakhstan

An environmental audit is an independent assessment of compliance with regulatory requirements in the field of environmental protection, which includes the preparation of special recommendation sets for environmental activities [58][42]. The concept of modern environmental auditing originated in the early 1980s. In 1982, the European Economic Cooperation Directive on environmental auditing was adopted, and in 1984, the US National Environmental Protection Agency developed the concept of environmental auditing for federal agencies. Since 1993, sovereign Kazakhstan has utilized environmental audits, which are categorized as either obligatory or initiative audits. In the field of pasture livestock farming, the following types of audits are commonly employed: identifying environmental problems and proposing measures to solve them; determining the rationality of environmental management in a specific territory; verifying economic activity compliance with environmental requirements for each category of land; assessing the environmental safety of the methods and technologies used in business activities; assessing the environmental risk resulting from natural and human-made processes; evaluating the damage caused by pollution and hazardous waste; assessing the effectiveness of the environmental management system; and justifying legal acts from the standpoint of environmental safety [59,60][43][44].
Special terminology has been developed in English due to the peculiarities of the formation of environmental assessment mechanisms, and it continues to evolve with the development of practice. The United States Federal Law in the sphere of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) introduced a formal system for assessing the impact of planned activities on the environment for the first time [61,62][45][46]. Initially, the assessment process according to NEPA was referred to as the NEPA process. Later, it was given the name Environmental Impact Analysis and was eventually changed to Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). EIA became the main term in the late 1970s, indicating a systematic process of analyzing the potential environmental consequences of planned activities and considering their results in the decision-making process. In the 1980s, interest in analyzing potential environmental consequences increased not only for projects involving the construction of economic facilities but also for strategic decisions, such as plans for territorial and sectoral development, integrated programs, strategies, and regulatory acts. The environmental impact analysis of strategic decisions is known as a strategic environmental assessment (SEA). With the development of this tool, the meaning of the term “EIA” has transformed towards assessing projects concerning specific economic objects. Over the past 20–30 years, the term “environmental assessment (EA)” has become more widespread, encompassing project-level EIA and strategic environmental assessment (SEA) [63,64,65,66,67][47][48][49][50][51].
The conceptual basics described above are characteristic of the international scientific community and international documents such as conventions and agreements. However, the system of terms used in different countries may vary, and the same terms may refer to fundamentally different concepts or similar concepts in different ways. Translating these terms into other languages can also pose additional difficulties. To address terminological and methodological problems at the national level, Kazakhstan has adopted several legal acts in the field of environmental auditing and economic activity impact assessment over the years. The Governmental Decree of the Republic of Kazakhstan dated 23 August 2004, No. 889, “On certain issues of licensing and environmental auditing,” was developed for environmental auditing, while a document titled “On approval of the instructions for conducting the assessment of planned economic and other activity impacts on the environment in frameworks of preplanning, preproject and project documentation development” (Order of the Minister of Environment Protection of the Republic of Kazakhstan, No. 68-P, 28 February 2004, registered in the Ministry of Justice of Kazakhstan on 31 March 2004, No. 2769) was prepared for the assessment of economic activities’ impacts on the environment. All the essential state documents were later consolidated into the “Environmental Code of the Republic of Kazakhstan” (Code of the Republic of Kazakhstan, No. 212, 9 January 2007), which identified objectives for the environmentally sustainable development of Kazakhstan. These objectives include identifying environmental problems, analyzing and assessing the environmental aspects of economic and other projects, evaluating environmental legal regulations, developing sustainable production and consumption models, justifying environmental policies and strategies, and initiating environmental activities.

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