Economic, environmental and social efficiency and effectiveness development in the sustainable crop agricultural sector: A systematic in-depth analysis review

Agricultural systems design: Strategies for nutritionally oriented sustainable intensification

Sustainable intensification of agriculture has been proposed as a desirable solution to meet human needs while protecting the environment. However, due to varying concepts of sustainability and intensification, the meaning and means of intensifying agricultural systems sustainably remain an open debate. We ask whether the system's purpose (nutritionally oriented) and design can significantly impact sustainable intensification performance. The design of four agricultural systems ranging from monoculture to crop diversification gradients and crop-livestock integration for protein and energy (calories) reinforcement are compared for a four-year production cycle using a strong sustainable approach supported by the thermodynamic law: emergy assessment. The findings suggest that (i) crop-livestock integration and crop diversification increase renewability and reduce the unsustainability of agricultural systems; (ii) crop-livestock integration promotes sustainable intensification for both protein and energy purposes; (iii) increased crop diversification over the system cycle doesn't mean increased sustainability of protein or energy intensification, and (iv) the system's purpose defines the optimal design for sustainable intensification. We conclude that both the purposes and design of agricultural systems are relevant for nutrition-oriented sustainable intensification and require long-term assessments to reinforce such assertions.

Integrating life cycle assessment and multi criteria decision making analysis towards sustainable cocoa production system in Indonesia: An environmental, economic, and social impact perspective

Sustainable Cocoa production practices should be investigated comprehensively to address sustainability requirements and mitigate Cocoa production issues in Indonesia. This study aims to identify the sustainable Cocoa production system considering the environmental, economic, and social impacts. Life cycle framework and multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) were integrated to obtain the study's objectives by comparing Cocoa monocropping system (CM) and Cocoa intercropping systems (IC). The result indicated that in the environmental sustainability aspect, the monocropping system (CM) showed higher performance as indicated by the lower environmental impact in all indicators; for example, CM emitted a lower Global Warming Potential (GWP) that has a lower margin of 34.5-55.9 % compared to the intercropping system (IC-I and IC-II). In the economic aspect, both on the short-term and long-term analysis, the Cocoa intercropping system (IC-II) generated higher value-added and economic feasibility, with a higher profit margin of 150-205 % compared to CM and IC-1. Along with the increase of economic benefits in IC II, this system also significantly provides social benefits, as presented by the higher social index margin of 4.9-23.7 % compared to other systems. Furthermore, by applying decision-making analysis, the result determines the highest index on the Cocoa intercropping system II (IC-II). These findings highlight that applying the intercropping system II is recommended to overcome the cocoa issue at the farmer and decision-maker levels. Additionally, the proposed method that combined LCA-MCDM can be applied to another agricultural commodity to achieve sustainable agriculture production.

Sustainable crop production: Highlights on economic, environmental and social life cycle thinking

Seeking multi-dimensional inclusion is one of the most global concerns of the crop production sector worldwide. Socio-eco-effectiveness or socio-eco-efficiency optimization plays a crucial role in future strategy establishment. Life cycle is a widely used approach examining economic, environmental, and social impacts. Recently, life cycle thinking approaches have been increasingly utilized to bring to light useful perceptions of the crop production processes. This study aims to apply a systematic review and prescriptive analytics to critically investigate the life cycle thinking approaches application according to sustainability pyramid aspects, life cycle thinking unicity, goal and scope variability, functional units' causality, system boundary' diversity, involved aspect' concentration, indicators, impacts categories and influencing variables distribution, as well as to define a first datasheet model and directive axis to apply per aspect and family for socio-eco-effectiveness or socio-eco-efficiency evaluation. Over 295 peer-reviewed studies from 2019 to the middle of 2023, 52 reviews and articles gathered from Web of Science and Scopus meet the criteria to be analyzed. Our inspection revealed that related reviews are few, approximately 2 %. Moving from the traditional life cycle perspective to the sustainability pyramid approach, the indicators applied by researchers were classified per aspect and family belonging. A deductive analysis was carried out to narrow the impact categories, and the influencing factors to the population's main interests: four economic (input status, resources consumption, waste, and Costs of Life Cycle), eight environmental (Climate Change, Global Warming, Ozone, Acidification, Eutrophication, Photochemical Oxidation, Abiotic Depletion, and Toxicity), and three social families (Human Toxicity, employment, and Ionizing Radiation). The results combination highlights the construction need for a directive datasheet model to address the optimizing problem under the identified families and aspects constraints, as well as to envisage the units and methods worldwide standardization's necessity for spatial-temporal studies comparison in the present, the past, and the future.