Multicriteria decision-making and probabilistic weighing applied to sustainable assessment of beef life cycle

Abstract Environmental, economic and social aspects of the animal production phase of beef chain have been the focus of individual studies. However, integrated assessments are lacking. Thus, this study aims to develop an approach using sustainable life cycle assessment integrated to multicriteria methods of decision-making and probabilistic weighting in order to evaluate the sustainability of four different alternatives of animal production in the southern region of the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. By presenting the integrated evaluation in a single score, the system with crop-livestock rotation (CLR) obtained a better performance. The better performance was due to the reduction in mechanization costs for planting and a high capacity of animal support per hectare without directly using phosphate and nitrogen fertilizers. However, by evaluating individual criteria, the pasture fertilization system (PFS) obtained the best performance regarding social indicators due to the high generation of jobs and worker remuneration. Probabilistic weighting in conjunction with the VIKOR (VIseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje) multicriteria method proved to be an efficient solution to exempt human judgment from criteria weighting. This reduces the uncertainty of evaluation and allows a risk analysis considering all possible weight combinations in an integrated and individual way per criterion. However, studies on the development of new indicators related to systems, especially not evaluated criteria such as biodiversity, ecosystem services and animal welfare, are necessary to improve the evaluation of system sustainability.