Assessment of ecosystem services and dis-services of an agro-ecosystem based on extended emergy framework: A case study of Luancheng county, North China

• Build a framework to assess resource consumption, ecosystem services and dis-services.
• Build new indexes for evaluating the sustainability of agro-ecosystem services nonrenewable resources was the largest consumption.
• Provisioning services were the largest services.
• Regulating dis-services were the largest dis-services.
• Agricultural ecosystem of Luancheng was a serious consumer-based system.

An agricultural ecosystem provides provisioning, regulating and supporting services for humans. At the same time, it consumes the resources of other ecosystems, including the investment of economic resources and can generate useless or harmful services, collectively called dis-services. Here, we built a framework for assessing agricultural ecosystem services and dis-services based on emergy analysis of Luancheng County, China. We analysed the inputs and outputs of the agricultural ecosystem from the three aspects of consumption of resources, ecosystem services and ecosystem dis-services and explored the variations in inputs and outputs from 1984 to 2008. We then proposed composite indexes for measuring the sustainable development of the agro-ecosystem. Our analysis showed that the agricultural ecosystem consumed a lot of resources, especially the nonrenewable ones; provisioning services were the largest services and provisioning dis-services were the largest dis-services. Both provisioning services and dis-services increased yearly as purchased nonrenewable inputs increased. The overall evaluation of the Luancheng agricultural ecosystem showed it to be a serious consumer system and thus not developing sustainably. The farming community should take steps, such as controlling excess inorganic fertilizer input, increasing organic fertilizer use and improving water and fertilizer use efficiency to ensure sustainability.