Mapping Agricultural Sustainability Through Life Cycle Assessment: A Narrative Review

Over the past few decades, the concept of sustainable agriculture has gained popularity. However, the notion of sustainable agriculture is highly imprecise and unclear, making its application and execution exceedingly challenging. Moreover, disagreements about what sustainability means can lead to a deeper understanding of the intricate empirical procedures and possibly debatable principles involved in any effort to achieve sustainability in agriculture. Practices to increase crop resilience, lower chemical inputs, and boost efficiency are examples of future developments. This review identifies how agricultural life cycle assessment (LCA) studies engage with climate-related metrics such as GHG emissions and land use changes, offering insights for adaptation and mitigation strategies. This review also addresses the need to synthesize existing research on how agriculture and food systems can become more environmentally friendly through LCA. LCA enables the identification of environmental hotspots within agricultural systems, therefore, guiding efforts to limit resource consumption and emissions. For this purpose, a search of a bibliographic database was carried out and the results obtained were analyzed with the open-source tool bibliometrix. There were 2328 results in total with publication years from 1993 to 2025, the latter of which refers to a pre-publication. Then, a post-processing analysis of 1411 articles was conducted and a narrative review of around 100 publications was carried out, where agricultural practices with LCA, current trends, and research gaps were explored. Finally, this paper contributes by identifying three major research gaps derived from the literature synthesis: firstly, the underrepresentation of dynamic LCA models in agriculture; secondly, the lack of geographical balance in case studies; and thirdly, the insufficient integration of socio-economic dimensions in environmental assessments.