European Journal of Sustainable Agroecosystems

Background: Cereal-based cropping systems such as rice-wheat systems, maize-wheat crop rotations, and rice-rice sequences play a crucial role in food security for South Asia, but they have also led to significant greenhouse gas emissions, energy use, and nutrient losses caused by unbalanced fertilizer usage. Integrated nutrient management (INM), which combines the use of mineral fertilizers with organic manures, crop residues, and bio-fertilizers, is a recommended agricultural practice but its environmental performance has not been effectively studied in different climatic regions of India through a life cycle assessment (LCA) approach. 
Objective: This study aims to review the existing literature on the environmental performance of INM systems in cereal cropping systems of India, compare results for different cropping systems and ecological zones, and find out gaps in methodology and knowledge.
Literature sources: A comprehensive literature survey of Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed/MEDLINE, AGRICOLA, Google Scholar, along with reports from the FAO, ICAR, and IPCC covering articles published from 2015 to 2025 provides 1,842 records of which 83 studies met the inclusion criteria and 68 were finally included in the thematic synthesis.
Insights obtained: INM is consistently found to be more effective in reducing the carbon footprint per unit of grain yield as compared to the use of only inorganic fertilizers due to its higher nitrogen-use efficiency and increased soil organic carbon storage. Nevertheless, the total global warming potential is influenced mainly by methane emissions from submerged rice and methane produced from livestock manure in some systems. INM also offers high energy-use efficiency and net energy returns; site-specific nutrient management reduces the difference between the ideals of agronomic and environmental effectiveness. Different regions of the Indo-Gangetic Basin, Deccan Plateau, and coastal agro-climatic zones show differences in findings because of variability in soil type, water profile, and crop intensity.
Gaps in studies: The literature is supported by the varied boundaries of the system and measures used in the literature, at the same time mostly using IPCC Tier 1 GHG emissions factors to data from other countries and areas of investigation, scant references to rotation involving millets and pulses, very few cradle-to-grave assessments instead of cradle-to-farm-gate due to weak integration of sociological and economic aspects and farmer-adopted methods.