Selecting the best environmental friendly oilseed crop by using Life Cycle Assessment, water footprint and analytic hierarchy process methods

The rising concern about agro-environmental problems has made the selection of green crops a critical task for agriculture sector. The choosing of alternative eco-friendly crops is a main task in developing countries, especially in Iran. As a complete framework, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) evaluates agricultural activities on the environment. However, this framework, by itself, is not able to directly assess water use impacts. Accordingly, it is necessary to integrate certain methods capable of being developed to evaluate water effects into this framework so as to achieve a more comprehensive assessment. Water footprint (WF) is one of the best indicators developed with the aim of evaluating the virtual water contents of corps. Practitioners can take the benefit of LCA + WF in association with management methods and optimization techniques, including Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) to obtain better results in their studies and provide their target populations with more practical solutions. In the current study, we recommend a general way to compare the agro-environmental efficiency of oil seed crops. The goal of this research was to evaluate the environmental effects and WF of the production of soybean (Glycine max), sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.), and canola (Brassica napus) oilseed crops in Ardabil-Iran. The environmental impacts categories are eutrophication, acidification, global warming potential, and photochemical oxidation. The total amount of WF of soybean, sunflower and canola in Ardabil Province are 839.57, 1209.04 and 2329.64 m(3)/tonne, respectively. It was found that the environmental effects from the three crops comes generally from manufactured fertilizer, manure, diesel combustion, agricultural practices, and electricity for irrigation. The results showed that sunflower demonstrated a higher environmental load because of its lower seed yield and higher WF and energy demands. It can be concluded that soybean is most appropriate for cultivation in Ardabil situations. Results indicated that integrates WF and LCA methods to compare the agro-environmental efficiency of oil seed crops could be applied as the starting point for assessment of crop production systems aimed at cost management, WF and environmental burdens reduction, and optimization in the oilseed crop production sector. The assessment framework would be adaptable and applicable to any other agricultural systems, including different crop rotation and production systems. It can be finally improved to overshadow the entire agriculture sector. The proposed systemic approach can be also modified according to any research goals and scopes. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.