A multi-attribute decision method assessing the overall sustainability of crop protection strategies: a case on apple production in Europe
Résumé
Although several alternative pest management strategies are available, crop protection in general and apple crop protection in particular often relies on pesticides. This is largely because multiple environmental and economic aspects or attributes must be simultaneously considered by crop managers, which makes it difficult for them to determine whether one strategy is more sustainable than another. In our study, we investigated the elements that must be considered to obtain a clear and useful assessment of sustainability. We present a system-description tool created especially for life cycle assessment (assessment of energy use and ecotoxicity), environmental 2 risk assessment, and full-cost calculations. Using the various results from these assessments as qualitative attributes, we designed a multi-attribute tool that allows us to integrate sustainability attributes over five levels into an overall sustainability rating. To demonstrate the transparency of this method and how it enables decision makers to deal with complexity, we use the method to assess different crop protection systems used in apple production. Although, the multi-attribute decision method provided a reasonable overall assessment of the sustainability of different protection systems, the assessment could be substantially influenced by the selection of rating scales and decision rules. Therefore, the rating scales and decision rules should be carefully defined and discussed among the research teams. In our case, experts have participated from five European countries. Keywords: multi-attributive decision making, apple orchard, crop protection strategy, sustainable development, life cycle assessment (LCA), SYNOPS, full-cost calculation.