Its Findings Published in JAEID A Study at UoB: An Inventory of the Most Common Indicators to Measure the Sustainability of Agriculture

University of Bahrain (Yasmeen Khalaf)
9 January 2022
The findings of a study conducted at the College of Science at the University of Bahrain (UoB) indicated that the most common indicators in the pillars of agricultural sustainability are: the environmental pillar, the social pillar, and the economic pillar.
The study, which was conducted by the researcher in the PhD program in environment And Sustainable Development at the College of Science, student Asma’a Mohammed Ali, focused on the indicators most commonly used for each of the pillars of sustainability, which were discussed in more than seven researches. The findings showed that the environment pillar was the most cited, with an average of about 60 citations, and that the pesticide index is the oldest in terms of the average year of publication, and the most cited in the year 2005, where the number of citations reached more than 250. While the least cited indicators are farm income, and training and its other aspects. However, the economic pillar is one of the pillars that has been recently focused on in many scientific researches, as it has been applied on a large scale with a total of seven research published in 2020.
Moreover, it was found that the most common indicators in agricultural sustainability are: soil erosion index, crop diversity, pesticides (environmental pillar), education and training index (social pillar), and profitability, productivity and farm income index (economic pillar).
The study was published in the Journal of Agriculture and Environment for International Development (JAEID), which is a global multidisciplinary scientific journal dealing with agricultural production, food security, the environment, remote sensing and soil science.
The study aimed to analyze the sustainability indicators used in 30 scientific researches to answer the following questions: What are the most commonly used indicators to measure sustainability in agriculture? What are the most cited sustainability indicators and pillars? What is the direction and index of each pillar over the years?
The importance of the study is reflected in its findings, as they constitute a set of indicators that can be taken into account in future policies, which may contribute to the development of agricultural sustainability strategies.
It is worth mentioning that the researcher student Asma’a Mohammed holds a master’s degree in business administration from New York University of Science and Technology in 2009, and is the head of the Business Development Department at the National Initiative for the Development of the Agricultural Sector.

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