Sustainable agriculture II: Evaluation

Abstract

Evaluating sustainable development is, at present, an essential prerequisite for promoting sustainable agriculture. For this, it becomes necessary to know the evaluation methodologies that explicitly reflect the environmental, social and economic advantages and disadvantages of different strategies and production systems.

In that sense, this work presents research initiatives in the scope of sustainability evaluation in particularly for the agricultural sector. The critical review shows that despite the variety of identified methodological proposals shows some major efforts for the sustainability evaluation, with similarities in some of their assumptions, they confirm, in general, unrelated procedures, with some common limitations and weaknesses and lack of interaction between a large part of the developed approaches.