Sustainable agriculture III: Indicators

Abstract

The sustainability indicators, alone or integrated into complex models, constitute the instrument of sustainability assessment usually found in literature and applied empirically. The found procedure to identify the indicators and its measurement has, however, lead to some relevant issues, jeopardizing the value retrieved and the sustainability evaluation developed. In this sense, some considerations concerning the development of sustainability indicators are presented, that can justify the conclusion about the infinity of indicators that are liable to identify in different methodologies for sustainability assessing, as well as the limitation of criteria used in the occasion of their selection and measurement, despite the long list of cautions that can be encountered in various documents on the subject.