Sustainable rural development index

weaadmin — Fri, 04 Nov 2016 18:18:26 +0000

The Sustainable Rural Development Index (IDRS) was elaborated with the purpose of characterizing, in the rural space (predominantly occupied by agriculture and livestock), the economical (IDE), social (IDS) and environmental (IDA) development through three primary indexes, seven secondary indexes and seven parameters. The secondary indexes were computed using the mean values of different parameters, by county, trough normalized variables (range from 0 to 1). The economical index used the following normalized variables: Gross Income Product (R$.county-1.year-1) (first parameter), per capita income (R$.person-1.year-1) (second parameter) (in relation to their maximum values for a specific county). The social index used relative values of scholarity (number of years) (third parameter), life expectance (years) (fourth parameter) and employment level (%) (fifth parameter) (also in relation to their maximum values for a specific county). The environmental index used relative values of Legal Reserve area (ha) (sixth parameter), as well as the Permanent Preservation Area (ha) (seventh parameter), actually used by farmers and the correspondent minimum areas required by the Brazilian law 12.651 (published at DOU in 25 May 2012). The universal model, that typically presents exponential growth, was proposed for computing the secondary index (dependent variable) using a normalized variable as independent variable. This methodology was applied for characterizing the CODEMAU (Association for Developing the ‘Médio Alto Uruguai’ region) area (23 counties), located at North region of ‘Rio Grande do Sul’ State. It was verified that: (i) ‘Rodeio Bonito’ and ‘Dois Irmãos das Missões’, ‘Alpestre’ and ‘Frederico Westphalen’, and ‘Vicente Dutra’ and ‘Taquaruçu do Sul’ were the counties that presented, respectively, the lowest and highest values of IDE, IDS and IDA; but, (ii) ‘Vicente Dutra’ and ‘Dois Irmãos das Missões’ were the counties that presented, respectively, the lowest and highest values of IDRS. The sustainable rural development index presents as an excellent tool for comparing regions (rural properties, counties, states and countries, for example).

Rural space – Food and Justice

Sustainable rural development index