Monte Carlo-Based Ex-Ante Assessment of the Green Benefits of an AI-Driven Smart Agriculture Platform in Hainan
Zhaoyang Li, Ruijie Zhang, Zhaoji Sun, Lu Zhang
Abstract
Smart agriculture platforms are widely regarded as key carriers for implementing China's pesticide and fertilizer reduction, water-saving and carbon-reduction agendas, yet a unified quantitative framework for assessing their green value is still lacking. Taking an AI-driven decision platform for tropical agriculture as the object (integrating large-language-model question answering, multimodal pest diagnosis, IoT sensing, satellite remote sensing, and a closed-loop field record system), this study builds a cradle-to-farm-gate agricultural carbon accounting model covering pesticide and fertilizer production, field N2O, irrigation electricity and paddy CH4, translates platform interventions into quantifiable transmission parameters, and propagates parameter uncertainty by Monte Carlo simulation over three Hainan scenarios (mango, winter vegetable, rice/nanfan, area-weighted 40%:30%:30%). Under full adoption, median reductions are 23.5% (90% interval 15.0%-33.2%) for pesticide use, 21.0% (13.8%-28.9%) for fertilizer, 16.5% (10.9%-23.5%) for irrigation water, and 21.5% (16.1%-27.2%) for carbon intensity. Attainment probabilities are high for fertilizer reduction >=15% (90.6%) and clear carbon decline (98.1%), but only about 20% for aggregate water saving >=20%, favoring scenario-specific statements. Sobol first-order indices show soil-test recommendation and organic substitution jointly explain about 83% of the variance of aggregate carbon-intensity reduction. Convergence tests show 10,000 iterations stabilize all statistics; conservative/baseline/optimistic scenario bounds are reported. The framework offers a reproducible, calibration-ready methodology for ex-ante green-value assessment and pilot observation design.