The evaluation of environmental, economic and social services of national parks

Abstract

One of the most effective factors in the sustainability of national parks (NPs) is the identification and determination criteria and indicators of the evaluation of environmental, economic and social NPs. The purpose of this study is the identification, customization, weighting, prioritization of criteria and indicators of NPs evaluation for determination of potential of environmental, economic and social services of Kiasar National Park (KNP). In the study, we used the Delphi questionnaire to identify criteria and indicators of the evaluation of environmental, economic and social NPs and entropy method to calculate their weight. Also multicriteria decision making such as an order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) and simple additive weighting (SAW) method were used for the prioritization of criteria and indicators for the evaluation of environmental, economic and social NPs. For this purpose, we evaluated the KNP in northern Iran. In this study, we identified eight criteria and 141 indicators including five environmental criteria with 91 indicators, economic criteria with 20 indicators, social criteria with 20 indicators and political criteria with 11 indicators. Finally, for customization of criteria and indicators, 42 indicators were rejected and eight criteria and 99 indicators including 66 environmental, seven economic, 15 social and 11 political indicators were accepted for NPs evaluation. The results showed that the most and least number of indicators was related to environmental and economic indicators, respectively. Also, the results of weighting criteria showed that protective and environmental functions’ criterion with weight (0.217) and conservation of biodiversity with weight (0.140) had the highest weight for the evaluation in environmental, economic and social services of NPs. Also the results of prioritization criteria with TOPSIS and SAW methods expressed that protective and environmental functions and conservation of biodiversity point of view environmental criteria had a higher priority than other criteria. The results indicate that Kiasar National Park has sufficient potential to provide environmental, economic and social services.