Research progress of evaluation system for China circular agriculture development

Research and practices on circular agriculture (CA) has been hotspots of Chinese agriculture development in recent years. CA plays a significant role in resource using, energy saving, emission reduction, enterprise and industry development, and farmer income improvement in China. How to build a suitable evaluation system is one of the top issues on the CA research and development. In this paper, the general progresses of CA researches were discussed, and the evaluating content, indicators and methods were summarized as well. Generally, the evaluation for CA was classified as two types. The first was macro-evaluation focusing on the national or regional scale, whose indexes were constructed base on the social and economic development, resource reduces, resource recycle and safety of resource and environment dimensions. The goal of this kind of evaluation was to determine the social, economic and ecological effects of CA development. Another kind was micro-evaluation focusing on the industrial park, enterprise, or local farm system scale, whose goal was assessment of the features of materials cycling and energy flow in CA systems, and the environment impacts as well. Many methods were introduced in this kind evaluation including system dynamic, emergy, life cycle assessment, etc. At the same time, there existed marked difference in evaluating content, indicators and methods for the micro-evaluation. Furthermore, the suitable evaluation index for different scales (national, regional, enterprise, detailed pattern or technology, etc.) were expected to further study, which should be according with the 4R rule (recycle, reuse, reduce and regulate) of CA.