Assessing the sustainability of ecosystems over fourteen years of cultivation in Longnan City of China based on emergy analysis method

Currently, the contradiction between the limited resources of China's cultivated ecosystems and population growth is becoming increasingly evident, and the negative impacts on the environment and human activities need to be curbed. Therefore, it is crucial to quantify the sustainability of cultivated ecosystems and determine these driving factors that affect their development. This study used the emergy method to quantify the input/output flow and sustainable development of the cultivated land ecosystem in Longnan City, combined with the logarithmic mean divisia index decomposition analysis (LMDI) method to evaluate the driving factors of sustainable development in the region. The results demonstrate that from 2004 to 2017, the total emergy input and output of Longnan City showed an upward trend, and non-renewable resources (N) were always in a dominant state in the total emergy (T) input, and their proportion rose from 59.69% to 66.92%. The emergy sustainability index (ESI) is less than 1, and the environmental pressure of the system is relatively higher. Comprehensive emergy production ratio (EPR), emergy investment ratio (EIR), the renewable fraction (R%), emergy yield ratio (EYR) and environmental load ratio (ELR), showed that the agricultural ecological economy in Longnan still has great development potential, and clean energy should be developed as far as possible to replace fossil fuels in future planning. LMDI results showed that the intensity factor ΔY′A is the main driving factor for the positive development of ESI. The government's ecological protection requirements can reduce waste emissions through reasonable farming system and advocating the use of organic fertilizer, so as to achieve the purpose of improving crop yield. Vigorous development of green ecological agricultural production patterns can improve the sustainability of arable ecosystems. This study can provide a theoretical basis for the sustainable development of cultivated ecosystems and the formulation of related agricultural production measures. •Waste water and Waste gas from farmland are considered in the emergy calculation.•The intensity factor ΔY′A is the main driving factor for emergy sustainability index.•Sustainability requires optimizing farming systems and developing green resources.