Abstract
The ecosystem service (ES) concept has increasingly been applied in environmental planning, while there are several decades of experience in applying multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) in complex planning situations. The aim of this article is to assess how the ES concept has been used in water management projects together with MCDA and to examine the experiences gained and make recommendations to overcome any identified challenges. Our conclusions are based on a systematic analysis of 23 articles that were selected among 206 articles focused on water-related studies using, for example, the terms multi-criteria and ecosystem services in the title, abstract or keywords. Here, we explore (i) at what level of detail ESs are included in the decision hierarchy, (ii) the pros and cons of the complementary use of the two approaches, and (iii) how the potential challenges related to the use of MCDA, such as the large number of criteria, double-counting, or assigning criteria weights, are addressed in the selected cases. The results reveal large differences between the case studies. It is shown that only a few case studies used ES categories to classify criteria in the decision hierarchy, that these cases included different numbers of ES criteria and non-ES criteria, and that most case studies elicited stakeholder preferences in MCDA. Although the paper focuses on water management projects, the conclusions regarding the advantages and pitfalls of the complementary use of the methods, as well as our recommendations, are also applicable to other environmental management contexts.
Highlights
The concept of the services and benefits provided by nature and ecosystems has been developed since the 1970s (Brown et al 2007; Gómez-Baggethun et al 2010)
multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) can be applied in various ways, and in this paper, for clarity, we focus on an MCDA process that builds on a structured process of value-focused thinking (VFT; Keeney 1992; Fig. 1)
We have analysed 23 articles to examine the complementary use of MCDA and ecosystem services’ (ES) concept in water management
Summary
The concept of the services and benefits provided by nature and ecosystems has been developed since the 1970s (Brown et al 2007; Gómez-Baggethun et al 2010). Following the stabilization of the terminology into the form of ‘ecosystem services’ (ES) (Costanza et al 1997; Daily 1997), it has become a widely known and mainstream paradigm with established practices for analyzing the benefits that people obtain from ecosystems (Chen et al 2020). MCDA methods have several benefits in ES assessment and valuation, such as a structured process of value-focused thinking, integration of subjective views into the evaluation, and non-monetary valuation (Chan et al 2012; Keune and Dendoncker 2013; Kenter et al 2016; Saarikoski et al 2016)
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