Abstract
The degree of complexity in forest management has increased in the last few decades, not only due to the inclusion of specific new issues (e.g., climate change, social protection, etc.), but also because these new, as well as classic, issues have to be dealt with in a context characterised by multiple conflicting criteria that are evaluated by different stakeholders. Nowadays, the multicriteria issue enjoys a relatively sound tradition in forest management. However, the consideration of several stakeholders, which requires the formulation of management models within a collective decision-making setting, is not that advanced. This paper aims to provide a critical overview of forestry case studies that have been published in primary journals and that deal with multiple criteria and several stakeholders. Based on this overview, some highlights of the most promising methods were obtained, and recommendations for the fruitful use of these combined methodologies for dealing with numerous types of forest management problems are provided.
Highlights
In many current forest management scenarios, there is an unquestionable need to incorporate criteria of very different kinds, i.e., economic, environmental, social, etc., into the decision-making process
The continuous methods detected in this work are goal programming (GP), compromise programming (CP) and multiobjective programming (MOP)
The joint use of group decision-making (GDM) and multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods in forestry was analysed, and it is clear that this type of methodology is significantly increasing
Summary
In many current forest management scenarios, there is an unquestionable need to incorporate criteria of very different kinds, i.e., economic, environmental, social, etc., into the decision-making process. The complications arising from the existence of several conflicting criteria have increased in the past few years due to the considerations or viewpoints on these criteria of the individuals or social groups potentially affected by the decision-making process implications (i.e., the so-called stakeholders). Against this background, there is need for a precise integration of multicriteria methods with those belonging to disciplines such as group decision-making (GDM) and social choice. It is inevitable that a confident merging of methods belonging to these two disciplines is required to successfully deal with many current and relevant forest management problems This necessity is especially crucial within a sustainability scenario. The very conceptualisation of sustainability implies the contemplation of several criteria within a well-defined social context [3]
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