The challenges of an increasing world population accelerating food demand, biodiversity globally under threat, depleting natural resources, and the need to mitigate the effects of climate change, signal that new food for thought is needed for food and non-food biomass production systems. Sustainable intensification (SI) needs to be one element of the solution. It aims at the development of intensive agricultural systems that have minimal detrimental environmental and social effects. The VITAL project explores the transition process of European agriculture towards sustainably intensified production. This first deliverable report synthesising the results of task 1.1 establishes the scientific framing of SI and the analytical approach of the project. We therefore analysed the literature using in-depth as well as systematic approaches and developed a conceptual-scenario framework of sustainable intensification. The aim is to establish an anchoring point to assess the implementation of SI at farm and regional scale and to enable an up-scaling of the results to the European level. The conceptual-scenario framework was validated by a group of regional stakeholders in order to ensure its applicability to practice and to develop a common science-practice understanding. We found that the understanding on what SI is and how it should be achieved varies in the literature and overlap with other concepts of sustainable agriculture, such as ecological intensification or agroecology, is debated. However, in this report we demonstrate that the discussed measures and concepts of sustainable intensification can be clustered alongside two dimensions: from the farm/local to the landscape/regional level and from land-use optimization to structural optimization. Using these two dimensions, we conceptualize four different scenarios of SI which we label sustainable intensification pathways (SIP). SIP I “Agronomic Development” and SIP II “Resource Use Efficiency” address land-use and structural optimization respectively on the farm level. On the regional scale we derive SIP III “Land Use Allocation” and SIP IV “Regional Integration”. The consulted local stakeholders were able to assign local solutions to each SIP. Based on the conceptual-scenario framework, an analytical line is drawn between SI implementation, evaluation and up-scaling defining the process of the project in a common analytical framework.