Sustainable Quality of Life Criteria for Ledang National Park Community: Fuzzy Approach

Abstract

Recently, there is a rising concern among researchers regarding the issue of sustainable criteria for quality of life (QoL). As it gains more interest, the issue becomes highly debated worldwide especially with regards to the national park community area. The aim of this study is to assess the identified sustainable criteria for QoL, particularly for the surrounding community of Ledang National Park (LNP) using the fuzzy Analytical Network Process (ANP). The fuzzy ANP was employed based on graded mean integration of representation and canonical representation of multiple operations to derive both local and global weights. To show the feasibility of the proposed method, three decision makers (DMs) were identified from the relevant agencies to assess three main criteria using linguistic evaluation via pairwise comparison process. In addition, nine sub-criteria were also investigated and analysed thoroughly using six steps of the fuzzy ANP towards achieving the sustainable criteria for QoL assessment. Based on the numerical analysis, it was found that the sub-criterion health(c32) has the highest global weight with a score of 0.184, which indicates that this sub-criterion is the biggest contributor to achieve the sustainability of QoL. The results also revealed the overall total score of 73.14%, thus placing LNP in the ‘moderately sustainable’ category. In the future, the entire investigated sub-criteria are suggested to be maintained and used to measure the sustainability of QoL. The findings from this study can be used to guide and assist the relevant authorities for future development planning in studied areas.