7. Conclusions

Productivity, security, protection, viability, and acceptability are the main factors of sustainable land management. But, implementing sustainability remains a hard event in many agricultural situations, and the concept of sustainability needs to integrate a comprehensive assessment of ecological, economic, and social dimensions to achieve sustainable agriculture.

Sustainability evaluation is a multidimensional issue involving huge amounts of complex information. Therefore, perfect evaluation is uncommon; in this sense, there is a need to systematically reduce the complex information to a more concentrated form while constructing the pyramid of information aggregation, at the base of which are raw data and at the top the indexes.

The first generation sustainability indexes do not incorporate interrelations between the components of a system. Examples are environmental indicators, as CO2 emissions, deforestation or erosion. The second generation use composed indicators, normally with four dimensions: economic, social, productive, and environmental. Now, there are coming the third generation, indicators that it is necessary to build. They correspond to binding synergistic or transversal indicators, which simultaneously incorporate several attributes or dimensions of sustainability.

The assessment of sustainability needs to continue exploring in agriculture systems an integrated approach, and in the future, the set of multidimensional indicators (economic, ecological, social, and technical indicators) will be evaluating both separate parts of the system and their relationships.
