CONSTRUCTION OF AN INDEX SYSTEM FOR SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT IN SMALLHOLDER FARMING SYSTEMS

Highlights

● A five-step process for quantifying smallholder farming system sustainability is proposed.

● Definition of system boundary, functional unit, and indicators depends on research issues.

● Weighting, conversion, and aggregation methods tightly relates to the validity of assessment results.

Abstract

Smallholder farming systems are important for global food security, but these faces multiple environmental challenges hindering sustainable development. Although sustainable smallholder agriculture issues have been widely discussed and addressed by scientists globally, harmonized approaches in evaluating sustainability are still lacking. This paper proposes a five-step process for constructing a sustainability assessment method for smallholder farming systems, namely definition of system boundary, indicator selection, indicator weighting, indicator conversion, and indicator aggregation. The paper summarizes the state-of-art progresses in agricultural sustainability assessment at different stages, and systematically discussed the benefits and limitations of weighting and aggregation methods. Overall, this evaluation process should be useful by providing rational and comprehensive results for quantifying the sustainability of smallholder farming systems, and will contribute to practice by providing decision-makers with directions for improving sustainable strategies.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

indicator aggregation / multi-indicator / smallholder agriculture / sustainability assessment / weighting method

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by China Scholarship Council (201913043).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Xiaoxia Guo, Chong Wang, and Fusuo Zhang declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose. This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2022. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)