Assessment of agricultural sustainability in agro-climatic regions of India: A single-valued neutrosophic distance measure-based hybrid ranking framework

Abstract

With the significant dependency on climate patterns and water availability, the agriculture sector is highly prone to fluctuating climate conditions. However, the assessment of agricultural sustainability in agro-climatic regions is a multifaceted and uncertain decision-making problem due to the involvement of multiple sustainability aspects concerning environmental, economic, and social dimensions. To this aim, this work proposes a hybrid ranking framework in the context of single-valued neutrosophic sets, which combines the modified relative closeness coefficient-based approach, the pivot pairwise relative criteria importance assessment tool, and the weighted integrated sum product method with single-valued neutrosophic information. This framework first presents a formula to obtain the significance of decision experts’ opinions using the truth membership, indeterminacy membership, and falsity membership degrees of a single-valued neutrosophic set. Next, the decision experts’ opinions are unified to determine the aggregated single-valued neutrosophic decision matrix, wherein each of its elements denotes the single-valued neutrosophic performance rating of an alternative with respect to considered evaluation indicators. Further, the weights of indicators are determined by combining the objective and subjective weighting models through the relative closeness coefficient-based approach and the pivot pairwise relative criteria importance assessment model, respectively. To find the relative closeness coefficient of indicators, a novel single-valued neutrosophic distance measure is proposed, which evades the deficiencies of existing distance measures. Finally, a hybrid weighted integrated sum product method is presented to rank the alternatives. To demonstrate the relevance and exhibit the efficacy of the introduced framework, it is applied to a case study of agricultural sustainability assessment in 10 considered agro-climatic regions of India. For this purpose, some indicators related to the triple bottom line of sustainability have been recognized from the literature review for the selection of a sustainable agro-climate region in India. The outcomes demonstrate that the “Trans-Gangetic Plain” region has the maximum preference, while the “Western Dry Region” has the least preference among the other agro-climatic regions. Irrigation intensity, crop diversification, receiving remittance as well as membership in the agricultural credit society are influencing indicators responsible for agricultural sustainability in the “Trans-Gangetic Plain” region compared with the “Western Dry Region”. Lastly, sensitivity and comparative discussions are shown to test the stability and strength of the proposed ranking model under the setting of single-valued neutrosophic sets. The proposed multi-criteria evaluation method provides insights for policymakers in evaluating and selecting economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable agro-climatic regions under the context of single-valued neutrosophic information.