Using accounting dataset for agricultural sustainability assessment through a multi‐criteria approach: an Italian case study

Abstract

Sustainability has become a key issue for agricultural systems. In this context, sustainability assessment implies considering different aspects of agricultural activities, including environmental, economic and social issues, and it is usually based on practice‐based indicators. However, proposed methods and applications are still rare due to the difficulty to build a strong general framework and to find appropriate data. The present work develops a performance indicator framework using farm accounting data from the Italian Agricultural Accounting Information Network and proposes a multi‐criteria approach based on the multiple reference point weak‐strong composite indicators (MRP‐WSCI) method to assess the degree of sustainability at the farm level. This method, widely applied to sustainability assessment, calculates the relative rankings including the weak and strong approaches to sustainability and facilitates an understanding of the different indices used, but it is still unused in the agricultural sector. The proposed evaluation framework shows that MRP‐WSCI can handle a holistic set of indicators and rank the farms according to their level of sustainability, making it suitable for the agricultural farm sustainability assessment. Our results show that none of the farms in the case study sample can be classified as “good,” according to some of the indices produced, that is, the strong–strong and strong–weak index, while just two of them are good for the weak–weak index. Although the size of the sample used is small, the methodological approach proposed can be straightforwardly extended to larger samples. This methodology can provide information regarding the sustainability of farms to regional and/or national agricultural offices, agricultural extension workers, and farmers themselves, helping in understanding issues in specific dimensions.

Economic and Environmental Sustainability Trade-Off Analysis in Sheep Farming Using the Farm Accountancy Data Network Database

“…Data were extracted from the FADN database, which has been used in recent years to evaluate the sustainability of the agri-food sector [31,[62][63][64][65][66]. Its principal purpose is to provide data for the EU Commission to assess the economic performance of farms and the impact of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) [67].…”

“…In order to support the sustainable development of agricultural and livestock systems, sustainability assessment is essential [31], because sustainability is a concept without substance if it is not associated with an indicator that evaluates it [32]. Moreover, as a multifaceted concept with various meanings for different actors [33], sustainability cannot be assessed by addressing only one aspect; rather, it must be considered in its entire complexity without overlooking the interrelation among the single dimensions' components.…”

An extended best–worst multiple reference point method: application in the assessment of non-life insurance companies

“…The weights obtained in this Phase 1 are incorporated into a Multiple Reference Point model (Ruiz et al 2020;García-Bernabeu et al, 2021;Cabello et al 2021;Boggia et al 2022) for ranking and choosing the best unit.…”

Sustainability of European agri-food supply chain using MRP-PCI multicriteria analysis method

“…In El Gibari et al (2021, the advantages of the joint use of compensatory and non-compensatory schemes are analysed. This methodology has been successfully applied to sustainability assessment problems in several papers, even in agri-food sector (Cabello et al 2014(Cabello et al , 2019(Cabello et al , 2021Ricciolini et al 2022;Boggia et al 2023). The Multiple Reference Point-based Partially Compensatory Composite Indicator (MRP-PCI), described in Ruiz and Cabello (2021), is an adaptation of the MRP-WSCI to the use of different compensation degrees for the single indicators considered.…”