Agricultural life cycle assessment: a system-wide bibliometric research

The main research content, highlighted by author keywords, involves issues like the environmental impact of agriculture, procedural aspects (inventory, impact assessment), LCA categories (greenhouse gas emissions, land use), methods (carbon footprint), impact of fertilisers (with an emphasis on nitrogen), organic production. Basic themes of agricultural LCA research involve studies on environmental impacts and climate change effects of agriculture (products, systems, practices). The impact of agriculture on resource depletion and the using LCA in the context of agricultural policy constitute niche topics. Dealing with greenhouse gas emissions and methodological aspects of LCA application in agriculture are topics leading the field of research. This is also reflected in the research evolution map: the carbon footprint, procedural aspects (inventory and impact assessment stages), and climate change shape the content of the current stage (2020-2022). Besides, the production side is getting more attention in the current research development phase, as the previous review [29] mentioned.

In general, the obtained results align with previous findings concerning the LCA expansion in agriculture and appropriate research growth [19; 20; 30; 28], and the leadership of developed countries [22; 28], despite the breadth of the studied context. As Fan et al. mentioned, several problems outlined in 2008-2011 remain unsolved: the problem of choosing a functional unit, allocation procedures, and setting the system boundaries [27] - but this research are not frequent. The practice of LCA application to compare different production systems (organic and conventional, extensive and intensive, small and large, traditional and developed), outlined by Ruviaro et al. [30] is found still relevant. However, the LCA application is expanded to compare urban and suburban food supply systems. Our review confirms the significance of environmental assessments and contexts of LCA studies in agriculture, like previous studies [25; 27]. Nevertheless, it shows the predominance of the narrower perspective - GHG-related evaluations and research. Though the attention to social and economic aspects in agricultural LCA studies is growing [6; 7], this topic is not significant. Integrating social and economic assessments is seen as one of the ways to make LCA more useful. Ruviaro et al. suggested earlier the integration of LCA with other methods to obtain better results in terms of environmental impact assessments [30]. Current LCA research explores integrating different assessments to get more comprehensive results (to adopt three-dimensional sustainable solutions). Moreover, integrating other methods with LCA is seen as a tool for including more deeply social and economic drivers [61] and to address the agriculture specifics (multifunctionality, complexity, and variety of effects) and support decision-making towards sustainability.

Additionally, a system-wide perspective allows for outlining the main areas within the agricultural LCA research. Results of documents clustering by references and an in-depth analysis of representative articles illustrate five main research directions. The most frequent are studies concentrating on GHG emissions in agriculture and related supply chains: scholars take GHG emissions (evaluated via LCA) as a measure of the feasibility of agricultural products, practices, and systems and the central area of improvement. Research investigating the variety of LCA - covered agriculture's effects has an average frequency but the least cluster impact rate. There is a pretty diverse group of articles covering issues like a single-indicator LCA inconsistency in agriculture (in contrast to the previous group of research), LCA potential to trace and predict the agriculture-related impacts on human health in the long run, and social LCA methodology's adaptation to the small farming context. Papers exploring LCA of agriculture's environmental impacts constitute the fifth part of the collection; the main discussion in this cluster centres around the assessment and interpretation of organic and traditional farming environmental impacts (the hotspot is the functional unit choice). The research focused on the potential of LCA to support sustainable solutions in agriculture involves papers discussing the multifunctionality and complexity of agriculture and the need to improve the LCA methodology by incorporating social and economic assessments and other decision -making methods. This direction is second from the top by frequency. The methodological discussion cluster - investigating allocation procedures and applying additional methods to support LCA comprehensiveness - is the least frequent but has the highest impact rate.

Conclusions

In conclusion, a system-wide overview of agricultural LCA research, which covered various areas of agriculture and LCA methods, reveals that LCA in agriculture focuses on greenhouse gases as a separate impact category. This means significant attention to research on agricultural practices that could contribute to carbon sequestration in soils and food chain shortening (to minimise transport operations and associated emissions). However, this doesn't cover all aspects of agriculture and overall sustainability (relationship between land use for food, feed, energy, and other resources, impact on ecosystems and local communities, etc.). Integrating social and economic aspects within traditional LCA study and using other methods to ensure the comprehensiveness of LCA estimates and well-informed decisions can solve the problem of ambiguity of results and interpretations of environmental LCA. This may constitute a future direction of research on LCA application in agriculture.

Generalising the research results and looking upon them in the context of previous studies, one should emphasise the “ closeness” of the research community manifested in the highest citation rates of earlier publications, the patterns of countries' collaboration, the journals involved in the publication of research results, the existence of problems regarding the LCA procedures in agriculture mentioned earlier but still being unresolved. Despite the growing publication activity, research progress is weak. Sharing knowledge and LCA tools, initiating a discussion involving actors and partners globally [62; 63], and investigating the policy applications, benefits, and regulations promoting agricultural LCA expansion may help to solve this problem and give a new breath to the research field.

Limitations and future research. The main limitation of the study is the database and language limitations. Covering only Scopus-indexed English-language academic papers could lead to excluding relevant research and contexts. However, the comprehensive coverage of the selected database and its overlap with others allows for generalising the research conclusions.

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