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. In this context, this paper aims to investigate and understand the current state of a major subject of climate change and its impacts on the environment and particularly on agriculture. All these can be measured by the Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) method so that its environmental footprint can be reduced. For this purpose, a search of the bibliographic database was carried out and the results obtained were analyzed with the open-source tool bibliometrix for the total findings which numbered 2,328 with publication years from 1993 to 2025 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 life cycle analysis, current trends and research gaps were explored.