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The Mediterranean forest is one of the mos … The Mediterranean forest is one of the most vulnerable ecosystems and is one which plays an essential role as a regulating element of water resources and climate change, as well as minimizing the advance of erosion and biodiversity loss. Nevertheless, there is a lack of studies which deal with decision making at a regional level that include stakeholders´ participation as a general framework for small scale planning, such as municipal or protected natural parks, as well as to design public policies.
The objective of this case is to develop an empirical model for the sustainable forest management at a regional level of the Mediterranean forest that takes public participation into account as well as the relevant objectives, integrating both aspects to inform public policies, using several Multiple Criteria Decision Making approaches.
The Valencian Community is located on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. It is an Autonomous Region of the Spanish State with its own authority for strategic forest management. Nowadays, the relevance of the Mediterranean forest is mainly due to the services that it provides and not to the traditional production of wood and cattle where its productivity is very low when compared with the Atlantic forest, characteristic of the North of Spain and Europe. The Valencian forest surface, covers almost 60% of the territory, but contributes barely to 0.03% of the GNP. The Valencian Community has a total forest area of 1,323,465 hectares and 4.5 million people, a population density higher than the European Union average.
We can summarize the methodology we have used as follows. Firstly, we proposed a decision hierarchy with the sustainable management of a Mediterranean forest as the decision goal at the first level. The second level consists of social, economic, and environmental criteria, the three basic pillars of the sustainability concept as well as the multifunctional forest. Each of these criteria is divided into specific objectives in the third level with enough detail to include all aspects which are currently relevant to the Valencian region. We have completed a decision hierarchy considering several management strategies taking into account those which are being applied by public administration as well as others proposed by experts.
Secondly, we identified Mediterranean forest stakeholders and we carried out a Workshop with representatives of these stakeholders to test the criteria, objectives and strategies previously proposed. In this workshop, with almost 200 participants, we carried out a round table with the stakeholder’s representatives (Administration, Professional Engineering Associations, people involved in Forest Research and Education, Hunting and Fishing Federations, Forest Owners -private owners and municipalities-, Companies and Land Stewardship, Environmentalist and Conservationist Groups), followed by a colloquium and general debate between all participants. Representatives of these groups are the ones usually invited by the Regional Government to collaborate in developing new forest programmes in the Valencian Community. Group participation with knowledgeable people is a good way to ensure that the decision hierarchy is a logical and complete structure. After that we carried out a survey amongst the stakeholders to determine their criteria and objective preferences using Saaty´s scale. Contribution of strategies to objectives was established with a later survey amongst experts.ished with a later survey amongst experts. +
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