Aggregation of Stakeholder Preferences in Sustainable Forest Management using AHP

The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is the most often applied approach to modelling strategic forest management problems. When dealing with Multiple Criteria Decision Making, AHP allows one to take social, economic and environmental criteria of sustainability concept, as well as public participation, into account. We carried out a workshop to validate a decision hierarchy for Sustainable Management in Mediterranean forests, as well as two surveys to elicit social priorities. Stakeholder and expert judgments were integrated using the geometric mean to obtain group preferences. We applied this method to develop empirical research into sustainable forest management in a Mediterranean region, where the environmental and social services of the forest are more important than the economic ones. We quantified weights of criteria, objectives and management strategy priorities and discuss the obtained results.