Sustainability in agribusiness: Analysis of environmental changes in agricultural production using spatial geotechnologies

Abstract

As global populations grow the growing demand for food and food security also rises. As global climate change proceeds, a growing demand for sustainability in said food production concurrently grows. Initiatives that address sustainability in agribusiness can now utilize geotechnology to identify losses in environmental quality resulting from methods of food production. The objective of this study is to evaluate the risks of environmental transformations categorized as: savannah, urban, water, forests, exposed soil, cultivation and regrowth in the municipalities of Carazinho, Marau and Passo Fundo, located in southern Brazil, demonstrating the potential of the approach in the Process Analytical Hierarchy (AHP), integrated with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to determine areas at risk of environmental degradation. This study considered parameters of density of rural buildings, soil type, use and slope. The AHP method was used to determine the weights of the parameters, through the following categories: savanna = 0.1; urban = 0.25; water = 0.9; kill = 0.1; exposed soil = 0.4; cultivation = 0.45; and regrowth = 0.5. The results showed that the integrated approach of AHP and GIS in a computerized environment proved to be effective for the mapping and quantification of environmentally degraded areas, attributed to the percentage of exposed soil, with the formation of sedimentary basins in river beds, with a high risk of 2.49%, with 2680 patches of exposed soil fragments identified. Exposed soil detracts from the sustainability of agricultural production in the region. This research is fundamentally important as it can be replicated in other regions, making it possible to assess environmental problems in relation to food production areas, aiming to raise the levels of agribusiness on a global scale.