article · Discover Agriculture
Farming in arid regions like Egypt faces simultaneous pressures from water shortages, energy insecurity, and organic waste accumulation, yet farm-level decision tools rarely account for social factors. To address this, a quadruple-bottom-line sustainability assessment framework was created to combine technical, environmental, economic, and social measures, including a food affordability metric. Evaluating Egyptian wheat and maize cultivation revealed that conventional farming systems achieve only around 52 percent of their technical sustainability potential. Introducing specific interventions yielded major improvements: drip irrigation raised technical performance by up to 31 percent, solar-powered systems achieved between 85 and 100 percent operational decarbonisation, and agricultural waste recycling delivered the most balanced gains in resource circularity. Together, these measures offer a practical route to sustainable agricultural intensification.
Farming in dry regions must manage severe water limits, high energy needs, and crop waste without making food unaffordable. By uniting social and economic measures with environmental data, this framework demonstrates how integrating renewable energy, efficient irrigation, and waste circularity can sustainably boost staple crop production in water-scarce landscapes.
The work evaluates applied, commercially available technologies, specifically drip irrigation systems, solar energy equipment, and agricultural waste recycling processes. Farm managers, agribusinesses, and agricultural policymakers can use the framework as a decision-support tool to select and bundle these interventions. Because the framework assesses field-ready technologies against baseline practices, the insights can be adopted immediately to guide technology investments and cross-sectoral agricultural planning in arid regions.
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Agriculture in arid regions such as Egypt faces a structural trilemma of water scarcity, energy insecurity, and organic waste mismanagement, yet current sustainability assessments often overlook critical social dimensions and lack integrated, farm-level decision-making tools. This study addresses this gap by developing and applying a novel quadruple-bottom-line sustainability assessment framework that integrates the technical, environmental, economic, and social dimensions with context-specific weighting for the Egyptian agricultural context. The framework operationalizes a food affordability metric and uses crop-specific benchmarks to evaluate conventional and improved scenarios for wheat and maize production. The results from its application show that baseline systems achieve just over half (≈ 52%) of their technical sustainability potential. Integrated interventions, particularly drip irrigation, solar-powered systems, and agricultural waste recycling, deliver targeted gains: drip irrigation improved technical performance by up to 31%, solar-powered systems enabled near-complete (85–100%) decarbonization of operational energy, and waste recycling emerged as the most balanced intervention for improving resource circularity. The framework’s reliance on crop-specific benchmarks and context-sensitive weighting makes it a policy-relevant tool. This study concludes that an integrated deployment of water efficiency, renewable energy, and circular waste management, supported by cross-sectoral planning, is essential for achieving sustainable intensification in Egypt, offering a blueprint for analogous arid agricultural systems.
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DOI: 10.1007/s44279-026-00761-7
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