A regional composite indicator for analysing agricultural sustainability in Portugal: A goal programming approach

Xavier, António; Freitas, Maria de Belém Costa; Fragoso, Rui; Rosário, María do

doi:10.1016/j.ecolind.2018.01.048

Cited by 32 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…In this case study, most of the companies (33) get bad results in just one of the three dimensions and only three water companies obtain poor results in the three dimensions: CM de Castelo de Paiva, CM de Arronches, and CM de Aljustrel. In managerial terms, within the top-20 rankings, those companies that follow the municipal concessionaire management model obtain good results in the environmental (13) and economic dimensions (11). Additionally, in the social dimension, the ranking is leaded by a mixture of water companies following different management models: municipal or State-owned companies (VIMÁGUA and EPAL), municipal concessionaire (Águas de Cascais), or direct management (SMAS de Sintra and SMSB de Viana do Castelo).…”

Section: Phase 1: Psui Dmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They have been used to develop CIs applied to diverse sectors of services, activities, or processes [2][3][4]. In particular, methodologies based on goal programming (GP) are of great interest for the construction of CIs and they have been successfully applied to diverse fields as tourism [5,6], manufacturing [7], human sustainable development [8][9][10], or environmental sustainability [11,12]. The main advantages of using GP to develop CIs are: it is not necessary to normalize the initial set of PIs; the CI uses the complete information included in the initial set of PIs; and it does not require a large number of units in comparison with the number of initial indicators.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Two-Phase Method to Assess the Sustainability of Water Companies

2019

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Composite indicators are becoming more relevant for evaluating the performance of water companies from a holistic perspective. Some of them are related with economic aspects, and others focus on social and environmental features. Consequently, a multidimensional evaluation is necessary for handling the great amount of information provided by multiple single indicators of a different nature. This paper presents a two-phase approach to evaluate the sustainability of water companies. First, a partial composite indicator for each dimension (social, environmental, economic) is obtained using multi-criteria decision making (MCDM). Then, a global indicator is obtained, in terms of the values reached in the previous stage for every partial indicator, by means an optimization problem rooted in data envelopment analysis (DEA). Our proposal offers the possibility of analyzing the performance of each water company under each dimension that characterizes the concept of sustainability, as well as a joint assessment including all the dimensions, facilitating the decision-making process. We apply it to evaluate the sustainability of 163 Portuguese water companies. The results show the strengths and weaknesses of each unit and serve as a guideline to decision-makers on the aspects for improving the performance of water utilities.

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Section: Phase 1: Psui Dmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Two-Phase Method to Assess the Sustainability of Water Companies

2019

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“…This statement comes from its importance in providing essential goods for human health, survival and well-being. In this sense, most concerns about sustainability in agriculture focus on the need to develop technologies and practices that have no adverse effects on environmental goods and services, that are accessible and effective for farmers, reflecting improvements in food productivity (Xavier et al, 2018).…”

Section: Sustainable Agriculturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some of the evidence on the perception of sustainability by soy producers is in line with what exposed Sydorovych and Wossink (2008), who stated that profitability is an important issue for economic sustainability, as well as issues related to worker safety are for social sustainability and attention to water is for environmental sustainability. Even with these data, caution is suggested in the analysis of sustainability indicators for agricultural activities, such as soybeans, since one cannot forget the complexity of finding a single measure to accurately assess the complete well-being of producers with relationship the association between production performance and sustainability issues (Limón & Fernandez, 2010;Xavier et al, 2018).…”

Section: Correlation Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Sustainability in Soybean Production from the Perspective of the Producers

Liszbinski¹,

Mello²,

Brizolla³

et al. 2020

JMS

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This study aims to analyze the sustainability in the context of soybean cultivation by the cultivators’ perspective. The research is descriptive, with quantitative evidences operationalized through the application of questionnaires to a sample of soybean producers in the state of Rio Grande do Sul/Brazil. It was executed descriptive analysis of the profiles of the soybean farmers and the properties and technical-agronomic aspects profiles, then subsequently, a correlation analysis between variables from the producers and properties profiles with the environmental, social and economic of sustainability dimension. By the result of the research, it was observed that the majority of soybean producers have been doing this work for 30 years, with low schooling. In addition, regarding the structure of the properties, the area intended for soybeans varies in the sample from 5 to 2,300 hectares, with 25.1% of producers allocating more than 296 hectares for this cultivation. In the production process, it was noticed that most producers use different inputs, such as herbicides, insecticides, fungicides and fertilizers, besides the care with the soil through the use of no-tillage system and search from crop diversification. In producers’ perspective of the sustainability, it is identified some significant associations between certain producers’ profiles and property variables with environmental, economic and social topics. However, the evidences, it is suggested a wariness from these analyses, since there is a disagreement in the literature on sustainability in agricultural activities, such as soybeans, because of the complexity of assessing the performance of farmer perception and sustainability indicators.

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“…After obtaining the goal of each objective function, we go back to solve the model (10)- (15). As, the model (10)- (15) was reformulated to the model (20)- (27), we introduce an effective goal programming approach for solving the reformulated model (for more about goal programming see [28,29,30,31,32]  As the objective functions are of minimization type, therefore, never an objective function can be less than its goal, therefore, 1 As a result of the relation (77), x is not a Pareto-optimal solution for the problem (71). This claim is in contradiction with the initial assumption ( x is a Pareto-optimal solution for the problem (10)- (15)).…”

Section:  mentioning

confidence: 99%

An effective solution approach for multi-objective fractional fixed charge problem with fuzzy parameters

2018

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A multi-objective fixed charge problem in existence of several fractional objective functions with triangular fuzzy parameters is considered in this study. The problem previously has been tackled only by Upmanyu and Saxena [1] with a method containing wrong mathematical concepts (see the commentary of Kaur and Kumar [2]). To overcome the shortcomings of the literature, an effective solution approach based on a typical goal programming approach is proposed to solve the problem for obtaining a Paretooptimal solution. The proposed approach considers the shortcomings of the method of Upmanyu and Saxena [1] and applies no ranking function of fuzzy numbers. In addition, the goal programming stage considers no preference from decision maker. The computational experiments provided by an example of the literature, prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Conflicts of interest: noneRemainder of the paper is organized by five sections. Section 2, describes some basic definitions and concepts of fuzzy theory and optimization theory. Section 3, introduces the FMFFCP, analyzes its formulation and deals with its non-linearity. Section 4, organizes the goal programming based solution approach proposed for the FMFFCP. Section 6, contains an illustrative numerical example from the literature to analyze the performance of the proposed solution approach provided by Section 4. Finally, the paper is ended by remarking some conclusions in Section 6. Basic conceptsSome basic definitions from fuzzy theory which will be applied later in this paper are explained in this sub-section. fuzzy theory, exact and meta-heuristic solution approaches.

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A regional composite indicator for analysing agricultural sustainability in Portugal: A goal programming approach

Cited by 32 publications

References 26 publications

A Two-Phase Method to Assess the Sustainability of Water Companies

A Two-Phase Method to Assess the Sustainability of Water Companies

Sustainability in Soybean Production from the Perspective of the Producers

An effective solution approach for multi-objective fractional fixed charge problem with fuzzy parameters

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