Agricultural best management practices (BMPs) can enhance sustainable agriculture, environmental conservation, and ecosystem resilience. Agricultural BMPs can reduce nutrient runoffs, such as nitrogen and phosphorus from farms into waterbodies, decrease nutrient impairment in watersheds, and thereby improve water quality. Such outcomes are vital in watersheds facing high nutrient loads, water pollution, and environmental decline. Thus, environmental policies have promoted agricultural BMPs to enhance sustainable food production and resilient ecosystems, a win-win for both producers and consumers of agricultural products and ecosystem services. However, the question of whether existing agricultural BMP evaluation approaches effectively showcase their impacts on sustainable ecosystem services remains unexamined. Therefore, we seek to address this gap by reviewing findings from relevant peer-reviewed journal articles to assess how robust their analyses are regarding the effectiveness of agricultural BMPs implementation policies for ecosystem resilience. We used the context of Lake Okeechobee in Florida, USA (one of the largest and most polluted lakes in the world), as a case study. Results indicate that most studies do not employ rigorous policy impact evaluation techniques such as randomized control trials, difference-in-difference methods, spatial econometrics, and instrumental variable approaches to explicitly measure the impacts of agricultural BMP application on ecosystem health. We believe that employing effective policy impact evaluation methods is essential for accurately assessing the environmental effectiveness of agricultural BMPs and for guiding sustainable policies for achieving sustainability outcomes across different contexts. This review can support ecological sustainability and contributes to achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs), especially SDG 6 (clean water and sanitation), SDG 14 (life below water), and SDG 15 (life on land) worldwide.
Cogburn et al. (Fri,) studied this question.