The Valuation of Ecosystem Services in the Venice Lagoon: A Multicriteria Approach

Chiara D’Alpaos,Andrea D’Alpaos

doi:10.3390/su13179485

Abstract

Coastal ecosystems are among the most economically valuable and highly threatened on Earth; they provide valuable ecosystem services (ESs) but are severely exposed to climate changes and human pressure. Although the preservation of coastal ecosystems is of the utmost importance, it is often sub-optimally pursued by Governments and Societies because of the high costs involved. We consider salt-marsh ecosystems in the Venice Lagoon as an example of a threatened landscape, calling for innovative, integrated management strategies, and propose an application-driven methodological framework to support policymakers in the identification of cost-effective incentive policies to ecosystem preservation. By combining group decision-making and Value-Focused-Thinking approaches, we provide a multiple-criteria decision model, based on pairwise comparisons, to identify which ESs are top-priority policy targets according to a cost-effective perspective. We implemented an online Delphi survey process and interviewed a pool of experts who identified “recreation and tourism”, “coastal protection from flooding”, “carbon storage”, “biodiversity and landscape”, and “nursery habitats for fisheries” as the five most relevant ESs for the Venice Lagoon taking into consideration the Environmental, Economic, and Social perspectives. Our results suggest that the Environmental perspective is the most important criteria, whereas “biodiversity and landscape” is acknowledged as the most important ES.

Highlights

We present a novel application of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in the domain of Ecosystem Services (ESs) assessment and develop and implement an AHP model to rank multi-criteria prioritization of ESs provided by the Venice Lagoon
Lagoon is currently suffering from a major environmental issue; they 2 shows the results of the multiple-criteria decision model, based on to pairwise tendTable to sustain environmental issues compared to social and economic ones
In order to design optimal incentive policy to the preservation of the Venice Lagoon, it is of paramount importance to evaluate the ecosystem services it provides and their relevance in a costeffective perspective towards a sustainable development of the area

Summary

Introduction

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The increasing anthropogenic pressure, coupled with the effects of natural processes exacerbated by climate changes, has further accelerated the morphological deterioration in the last century, due to the construction of the jetties at the inlets and the excavation of the large navigation channels, such as the Malamocco-Marghera ship canal [25,26,27,31] These erosion processes silting up [26,29,30]. The increasing anthropogenic pressure, coupled with the effects of natural processes exacerbated by climate of 15 changes, has further accelerated the morphological deterioration in the last century, due to the construction of the jetties at the inlets and the excavation of the large navigation channels, such as the Malamocco-Marghera ship canal [25,26,27,31] These erosion processes led to negative consequences for salt-marsh ecosystems in the Venice Lagoon.

Biogeomorphic

Methodological Background

Results and Discussion

Conclusions