A short story of agricultural system assessment
Abstract
Agriculture today faces major and sometimes contradictory challenges: continuing to meet growing demand for food and non-food goods while reducing negative environmental and social impacts linked to production. This also forms part of a broader context of climate change that requires major adaptations of crops and management. While stakeholders may not agree on the solutions, a consensus exists on the need for methods for assessing the sustainability of agricultural systems in order to evaluate both existing systems and innovative systems currently being designed. This article aims to trace the history of this multi-criteria assessment of agricultural systems, carried out in France since the beginning of the 90, starting with the pioneering work at INRA in Colmar, followed by work on life cycle analysis and the DEXi tool. Finally, the more recent development of integrated modelling and assessment with the MAELIA platform is presented. In a second part, it goes on to present the emergence of several attempts to help control this proliferation of indicator initiatives.
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BibTeX
@article{bockstaller2026short,
title = {{A short story of agricultural system assessment}},
author = {Christian Bockstaller and Frédérique Angevin},
journal = {Innovations Agronomiques},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.17180/ciag-2026-vol115-art01},
url = {https://hal.inrae.fr/hal-05805900v1},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - A short story of agricultural system assessment
AU - Christian Bockstaller
AU - Frédérique Angevin
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/19
JO - Innovations Agronomiques
DO - 10.17180/ciag-2026-vol115-art01
UR - https://hal.inrae.fr/hal-05805900v1
AB - Agriculture today faces major and sometimes contradictory challenges: continuing to meet growing demand for food and non-food goods while reducing negative environmental and social impacts linked to production. This also forms part of a broader context of climate change that requires major adaptations of crops and management. While stakeholders may not agree on the solutions, a consensus exists on the need for methods for assessing the sustainability of agricultural systems in order to evaluate both existing systems and innovative systems currently being designed. This article aims to trace the history of this multi-criteria assessment of agricultural systems, carried out in France since the beginning of the 90, starting with the pioneering work at INRA in Colmar, followed by work on life cycle analysis and the DEXi tool. Finally, the more recent development of integrated modelling and assessment with the MAELIA platform is presented. In a second part, it goes on to present the emergence of several attempts to help control this proliferation of indicator initiatives.
SN - 1958-5853
SN - 1958-5853
ER -