Bangladesh agriculture and the environmental impact Agro-ecological attributes and their changing trends showed that Bangladesh agriculture is experiencing environmental degradation over time. World Bank Data reported that 87.8 percent of the total freshwater withdrawal went to agriculture in 2011. The irrigated area as a percentage of arable land has increased from 44.8 percent to 59.7 percent within ten years from 2000 to 2010. Moreover, chemical fertilizer applied per hectare of arable land was just 188.64 kg in 2000 whereas it has increased to 281.7 kg by 2008. The annual pesticide consumption jumped from 25466.43 metric tons in 2005 to 48690.19 by 2008 (World Bank Data). Increased water extraction for agriculture and heavy use of fertilizers and chemical pesticides in irrigated fields have a negative impact on soil and water and even on future yields (Pagiola, 1995). The practice of intensive triple cropping of rice, i.e., the cropping pattern of Boro rice – transplanted Aus rice – transplanted Aman rice depletes 333 kg of total nutrients (i.e., N, P, K) from the soil per ha per year (MoA, 2008). The consequences of such negative environmental impacts are freshwater unavailability and higher levels of chemical emission. Farm chemicals applied in the irrigated fields along with crop residues are the major sources of agricultural pollution and emission. The World Bank data reported that methane and nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture have been increasing in Bangladesh (The World Bank, 2010). Such increasing trends in agro-chemical emission demonstrate that Bangladesh agriculture is causing potential threats to the atmosphere as well. In 2010, agriculture produced almost 84 percent of total nitrous oxide emission (estimated at 21.9 million tons of CO2 equivalent) and 68.3 percent of the total methane emission (estimated at 70.3 million tons of CO2 equivalent) in Bangladesh (The World Bank, 2010). Since the area under rice constitutes 76.7 percent of the gross cropped area (BBS 2012), it is obvious that the bulk of emission is contributed by rice farming which in turn is dominated by the use of HYV technology. As a country vulnerable to environmental impacts, it is therefore important to identify, analyze and evaluate the extent of pollution in Bangladesh agriculture. In this regard, agroecological research should specifically focus on chemical-intensive irrigation-based high yielding crop production technologies that are more prone to generate environmental risks. 4.A proposed indicator-based composite method .1Evaluation approach and its basis Environmental impact analysis should be done for a variety of farming systems. As such, organic farming, chemical-based fertilization farming, conventional agriculture, monoculture system, integrated farming, farming with the specific indigenous method, etc. all have been the subject of agro-ecological research. Previous impact evaluation studies also addressed farming practices such as seeding technology, fertilizer application, pesticide use, tilling practice, and irrigation management. It is presumed that the evaluation on the basis of both farm production practices and the farming system would work effectively when analyzing impacts at the local scale (Van der Werf and Petit, 2002). Particularly for the farm level studies, evaluation of the environmental impacts on the basis of farmers’ perception is also considered as equally important (Rahman, 2003; 2005; Rasul and Thapa, 2004). For a given ‘farming system’, it is the farmer, who is exercising ‘production practices’ and generating environmental impacts, and hence is experiencing resource extraction and pollution problems. This study, therefore, emphasizes considering farmers’ ‘perception’ of Agri-environmental attributes in impact indicator accounting procedure. It is hypothesized that the farmers’ perception, measured by obtaining their opinion on the intensity of the environmental impacts, has a considerable role to play in the analysis of agri-environmental sustainability. 4.2 Evaluation method Agricultural emission and pollution to the environment primarily depends on the state of the farming system which in turn depends, to a large extent, on the farming practices and the climatic factors, such as rainfall and temperature (Van der Werf and Petit, 2002). Farming practices, however, depend on farmer’s environmental awareness and their perceptions of the environmental impacts of the agricultural activities. Considering all of these interdependent agro-ecological aspects, this study presents an indicator-based composite approach. The proposed approach aggregates a range of indicators measured with means-based, effect-based (Van der Werf and Petit, 2002) and perception-based methods. Means, effect and perception-based methods are applied to the environmental indicators that are related to farming practice, farming system and farmers’ perception, respectively. For instance, chemical fertilization (applied chemical fertilizer as a proportion to the recommended dose) used to assess the agro-chemical risk is a means-based indicator, whereas soil chemical reactivity, such as soil alkalinity and acidity, are examples of effect-based indicators. Farmers’ perception regarding soil fertility loss due to the increasing rate of chemical fertilizer application could be considered as a perception-based indicator. Effectively, our proposed environmental impact evaluation approach, represented in Figure 1, incorporates the relevant environmental attribute groups in a composite manner.