Seventeenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

The concept of sustainable development has risen to the forefront of many scientific and policy debates in recent years from a wide variety of topics and disciplines. As a subset of sustainable development, agricultural sustainability is presented as a means to assess the long-term viability of farming under the three dimensions of sustainable development: economic, social, and environmental. However, there is currently no common analytical framework to effectively measure agricultural sustainability from a multidimensional perspective. A variety of different methods and frameworks have been developed to tackle this issue, but often fall short in their ability to measure the dynamic relationships between the dimensions. Moreover, the aggregation methods often used allow for compensability between the indicators, meaning that poor performance in one aspect of sustainability can be offset by excellent performance of another. To account for the shortcomings of previous studies, this research constructs a composite indicator for agricultural sustainability using a non-compensatory aggregation method. In doing so, the index reduces the potential for substitution between different performance measures and assesses how the interrelations between the dimensions contribute to the overall level of sustainability. The study uses data from the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) and other secondary sources to measure the sustainability performance of farming in Germany. The first findings of the research indicate significant differences in agricultural sustainability between east and west Germany, particularly in the performance of the social dimension.