Coupled life cycle assessment and data envelopment analysis to optimize energy consumption and mitigate environmental impacts in agricultural production

Abstract Reducing energy consumption in agroecosystems alone is inefficient. Dependence of food security on agroecosystems in the globe and the high share of environment emissions from agricultural activities in the world, which is about 10%–12% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions, cause comprehensive optimization of agricultural systems to be important. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) and life cycle assessment (LCA) are among the most widely applied methods in optimizing and evaluating environment, respectively, which have been considered by many researchers in recent years. As such, the aim of this work is to evaluate the integration of LCA and optimization of energy consumption applying DEA. In this regard, methods of computing input–output energy, environmental emissions, energy optimization using the DEA method, and reducing the amount of environmental emissions by this method are fully described and results are then interpreted.