Agricultural sustainability assessment using multicriteria indicators and hierarchical tools-a review

Europe's 2020 strategy considers sustainable management as an increasingly important criterion for the several normative and incentives recently legislated. It is expectable that in short-term, political decision-makers and farmers will need to evaluate the type and degree of their activities' impact on the environment, economy and society. For this reason, tools are required to ease and translate these evaluations, capable of defining the main imbalance factors that need action. Despite a wide range of sustainability assessment tools available in the literature, the underlying methodologies are very similar and resort to indicators aggregated in hierarchical evaluation models that should be representative and adaptive for putative transferability. This paper provides an overview of the most relevant computational sustainability evaluation tools and their scope of application, in a benchmarking analysis. To ease the comprehension of these tools, a literature review was performed to analyse their structural elements and based on methodologies.