Growing concern about issues such as environmental quality or the sustainability of natural resources has led to the use of the Decision Support System (DSS), which originated in the business field, and is now part of environmental decision-making processes. The presence of environmental, social, or economic dimensions has helped decision support systems to evolve to be able to tackle investigations that can contemplate all these variables, such as in the case of multicriteria decision analyses. In addition, new lifestyles, in which society recognizes more and more the contribution of forests to its welfare, have led to the need to involve stakeholders in decision-making processes. This article presents a review of different Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) and participatory decision support systems applied to forest environments. This last point is presented from the perspective of stakeholder participation in the processes and from the point of view of procedures or tools used. To do this, some of the research performed in forest environments within this current century is reviewed.
Sustainable forest planning should involve the participation of stakeholder communities in the decision-making process. This participation can help avoid the possible rejection of new planning measures. In this paper, the decision-making process to implement regulations on the use of forest tracks on the island of Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain) is analyzed. In recent years, the number of people using the island's forest environments has notably increased, leading to conflicts between different users of the tracks; as a result, the Island Council of Tenerife is working on regulating these pathways. This paper describes the framing analysis, design, and implementation of a participatory multi-criteria approach to explore, together with stakeholders, the best policy alternatives related to forest planning and management issues of forest track use. To do this, a set of tools has been developed, consisting of institutional analysis, participatory methods, and multi-criteria assessment techniques.
Regional efforts jointly done for synthesizing the situation about Integrated Coastal Management and Public Politics in Iberoamerica started almost a decade ago. Ten years later, the present Chapter is aimed to analyze advances regarding implementation of integrated coastal management in Cuba. Due to its condition of being a Caribbean archipelago, everything in Cuba is strongly linked to its coastal and marine characteristics; issues about integrated coastal zone management have received greater attention, becoming, at present, an item of maximum priority among the political and legal frameworks of the country. Improvement to the political-normative framework regarding integrated coastal management, increase in the number of institutions devoted to assess themes related to that topic, as well as in the number of projects, activities for Postgraduate formation and communitarian education regarding the topic, are all widely shown in the present Chapter. Approval and implementation of the National Plan for Social and Economic Development up to 2030 (NPSED, 2030), and of the State Plan to face the Climate Change (“Life Task” in Sp. “Tarea Vida”) have been irrelevant for the country. Both Plans are aimed to analyze typical problems of the coastal zone, focusing on the search of solutions. New challenges for coastal zone management in Cuba are also described in the present Chapter, where possibilities of putting into practice new actions, as well as items, which require deeper analysis, are also given.
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