An integrated sustainability score based on agro-ecological and socioeconomic indicators. A case study of stockless organic farming in Italy

Abstract

The purpose of our research is to develop an integrated sustainability score (ISS) choosing the farm level as system's boundaries and developing a methodology, based on a geometric mean algorithm, which is negatively affected by the internal imbalance of the agroecosystem. The first step is to identify and calculate the indicators of systems and sub-systems to assess the agro-ecological and socioeconomic dimensions of sustainability. The second step is the selection, weighting and integration of indicators that permit the calculation of the ISS ranging from 0 to 1. The farm sustainability score is categorized into three levels: weak, intermediate and strong. This methodology has been verified on a stockless organic farming system case study of 12 farms in Italy. Results show that most of the farms reached intermediate levels of sustainability but there are significant differences on ISS scores within the study group. Agro-ecological and socioeconomic dimension play a different role in highlighting the coexistence of different models of sustainability. A further development of the present methodology should include an in-depth analysis of the social dimension of sustainability and integrate an assessment procedure to formulate improved management practices that will help farmers to find win-win solutions that decrease the contrast between environmental and economic sustainability.

Sustainability Assessment of Organic Vegetable Production Using a Qualitative Multi-Attribute Model

“…In particular, the value for the high level of sustainability could be increased to at least 80%. This value is also confirmed by a study on sustainability of stockless organic farming in Italy that reports a soil cover average value of 89.45% [39] and by other developed soil cover indexes [40].…”

Sustainability Assessment of Annual and Permanent Crops: The Inspia Model

“…The more indicators are considered, the more accurate is the sustainability index. According to the literature, an acceptable procedure is to build a sustainability index, which should be based on the following steps; selection of indicators and their development, as well as normalisation, aggregation and weighting [19,20,25,31,33,39,[41][42][43][44] [48], Sustainability Assessment of Farming and the Environment-SAFE [45], Multicriteria Assessment of the Sustainability of cropping Systems-MASC [22], DEXi Pest Management-DEXiPM [31], Sustainability Assessment in Food and In Agricultural Systems-SAFA [41], SOSTARE [33], Sustainable Agri-Food Evaluation Methodology-SAEMETH [49].…”

“…Table 5 shows the methodologies that share some indicators with INSPIA, while Table 6 shows the level of agreement between different methodologies with INSPIA. According to the literature, the use of indicators and composite indices is gaining more importance in sustainability assessment and it is becoming more recognised as a tool for the adequate design of policy-making and general communication [12,20,24,26,29,46]. In this context, agricultural sustainability, in its multi-dimensional approach considers an operational development through the evaluation of the indicators system that involves the above-mentioned sustainability dimensions [73].…”

“…These tools help in the transition towards more sustainable production and consumption patterns [10] and can provide additional information about environmentally sustainability in a wider and long-term perspective [11]. Due to the inherent multi-dimensional nature of the sustainable development concept, it is accepted that agricultural sustainability should involve three pillars: economic (economically viable for the survival of the farms); social (keep or improve farmers' life and working conditions); and environmental (protect and even enhance the environment and protecting the natural capital), [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20].…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, until the last two decades, there have not been many approaches to agriculture sustainability assessment based on the social, economic and environmental dimensions [22][23][24]. In most cases, attention was just focused on one of the three aspects (economic, social, environmental) [20,[24][25][26]. For improving conventional farming performance, holistic approaches are needed, and therefore the Initiative for Sustainable Productive Agriculture (INSPIA) promotes a set of comprehensive best management practices (BMPs).…”