Forest management with multiple criteria and multiple stakeholders: An application to two public forests in Spain

Abstract

Nowadays most forest management problems require the integration of multiple criteria, at the same time as considering the points of view of several stakeholders with different perceptions of predefined criteria. As part of this theoretical orientation, a recent method for aggregating individual preferences expressed through pairwise comparison matrices has been adapted and applied in this paper to elicit social weights in the context of a forest management problem. The method was applied to two public forests in Spain. Four objectives were considered to be relevant in this exercise: biodiversity, net carbon captured, veneer volume and net present value. Twenty-three interviews with graduate students of the forestry school of the Technical University of Madrid were made in a pairwise comparison format. The respective 23 pairwise comparison matrices were aggregated into a final consensus matrix, which aims to represent the social importance attached to the four objectives considered. The applied method allows the establishment of a balance between the majority and minority principles.

Keywords:

• Forest management
• goal programming
• group decision making
• multiple criteria decision making
• pairwise comparisons
• participatory decision making

Acknowledgements

A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 22nd European Conference on Operational Research (July 2007, Prague, Czech Republic). Thanks are given to the Editor and to three referees for their valuable comments. We are highly appreciative of the patience and co-operation of our respondent postgraduate students from the Technical University of Madrid's Forestry School. This work was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science under projects SEJ2005-04392 and AGL2005-04514. Thanks go to Diana Badder and Rachel Elliott for editing the English.