Agricultural sustainability assessment and national policy-making using an axiomatic mathematical model

• Published in: Environmental and sustainability indicators Vol. 22; p. 100401
• Main Authors: Grigoroudis, Evangelos, Kouikoglou, Vassilis S., Phillis, Yannis A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.06.2024; Elsevier
• Subjects: Aggregation methods; Agricultural sustainability; Indicators; Shifted geometric mean; Agricultural sustainability; Indicators; Aggregation methods; Shifted geometric mean
• ISSN: 2665-9727; 2665-9727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.indic.2024.100401

Agriculture is a basic activity of human survival and its sustainability is of the utmost importance. In this paper, we present a novel mathematical model for the assessment of agricultural sustainability, based on certain intuitive and fundamental postulates. The resulting mathematical framework generalizes most existing models. We then rank 148 countries according to their agricultural sustainability, using data from the period 1995 to 2022 and pinpoint those aspects with the highest potential of improving sustainability using sensitivity analysis. Our findings demonstrate that farming is mostly unsustainable worldwide. The most crucial factors are connected with bad water use, destruction of biodiversity, and the prevalence of conventional chemical farming. As expected, poor countries make the bottom of the sustainability list. Surprisingly, several advanced countries such as Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands and Norway also occupy the bottom of the list because of very high emissions and bad performance concerning land and biodiversity. Finally, the highest score worldwide is of the order of only 70% and the median 50%, which exhibit a rather unsatisfactory farming state of affairs. Such findings ought to guide immediate action to make agriculture more sustainable. •Agricultural sustainability is measured using an axiomatic mathematical model.•26 environmental and socio-economic indicators are used and 148 countries are ranked.•Sensitivity analysis shows which indicators improve sustainability the most.•The numerical results indicate that agriculture is mostly unsustainable worldwide.