Sustainability assessment and optimization of legumes production systems: energy, greenhouse gas emission and ecological footprint analysis

This study examined energy, greenhouse gas emission and ecological footprint analysis (EFA) of chickpea and lentil cultivation with different mechanization production systems. In lentil production, except for tillage operations, other operations are performed manually and the remaining straw is burned in the field; while in chickpea production, most of the agricultural operations are mechanized and residues are collected, baled and transferred to the warehouse for animal feed. In this paper, for the first time, some of the sustainability indicators are investigated and compared in two different legume production systems. Energy productivity and net energy for chickpea and lentil production were calculated at 0.036, 0.161 and 2373 and 5900 MJ per hectare, respectively. The CO2 emission and ecological carbon footprint were 173 kg CO2−eq and 0.15 global hectare for lentil and 484 and 0.87 for chickpea production. Totally, due to excessive consumption of diesel fuel and lack of proper management, the social cost of emission from straw baling in chickpea production (27.65 dollars per hectare) was higher than burning straw in lentil production (8.77). Multi-objective genetic algorithm results showed the potential of minimizing diesel fuel and fertilizer consumption and no chemical for chickpea production. Overall audition results of two different production systems revealed that traditional lentil production is more sustainable. Therefore, implementations of modern agricultural practices alone are not enough to achieve sustainability in agricultural production systems.

Spatial-Temporal Calculation Simulation of Ecological Footprint of Resource and Environmental Pollution in Green Communication

As a quantitative evaluation method, the ecological footprint analysis method (EFA) is a frontier topic in the field of sustainable development. Human production activities will inevitably produce certain consumption, including the occupation of natural resources, resource consumption and waste production, which will have a certain impact on the ecological environment. This paper proposes to use the ecological footprint to inversely analyze the ecological environment and resource consumption, quantitatively convert the material consumption produced by human activities into the area of biological production land, and compare it with the supply area of the study area. The ecological footprint analysis method is used to reflect the changes in the indicators of regional sustainable development, and the regional sustainable development indicator system and analysis framework based on the ecosystem are constructed. The experimental result shows that the proposed model can effectively divide the resource space, and at the same time can measure the degree of resource transfer, which has important guidance for revealing the internal relationship between regional ecological footprint characteristics and regional development and evolution. significance.

Ecological footprint analysis for urban agglomeration sustainability in the middle stream of the Yangtze River

<p>How to balance ecosystem health and economic development is essential to study sustainability of urban ecosystems. Many methods for assessing urban sustainability have been developed, among which ecological footprint analysis (EFA) has been widely applied as a promising policy and planning tool. This paper proposed a modified EFA with the local ecological footprint being justified by adapting equivalence and yield factors in context of net primary productivity (NPP) from the Miami model. Biodiversity reserves were also incorporated using GIS technology and synthetic assessment of attributes to reflect various eco- logical functions. In addition, ecological footprint deficit (EFD), implying that the productive land cannot sustain current levels of consumption for a given population, was used to reveal the extent of ecological debt, while the ecological footprint variation index (EFVI) was proposed to describe the tradeoffs between real consumption and the carrying capacity of a specific region. A case study of urban areas in the middle stream of the Yangtze River Basin showed that the per capita EFD of the Wanjiang urban belt, central Poyang Lake urban agglomeration, suburban Poyang Lake urban agglomeration, Wuhan megalopolis, Jingmen–Jingzhou–Yichang urban agglomeration, central Changsha–Zhuzou–Xiangtan urban agglomeration, and suburban Changsha–Zhuzou–Xiangtan urban agglomeration increased by 64.83%, 178.05%, 214.82%, 59.08%, 71.68%, 100.62%, and 91.06% between 2000 and 2010, respectively. The local ecological footprint pressure index (EFPI) was classified into five levels. The Poyang lake urban agglomeration was found to be in a slight deficit, while all others were in a severe deficit in 2010. Calculations of EFVI also revealed that the booming urbanization occurred at great cost to the deteriorating ecosystems between 2000 and 2010. Accordingly, relevant influence factors were investigated using a forward stepwise regression method, which indicated that ecological deficit was positively correlated with GDP, population density, and emission of industrial waste, but negatively correlated with the tertiary industry.</p>