Dealing with Water Conflicts: A Comprehensive Review of MCDM Approaches to Manage Freshwater Ecosystem Services

Abstract

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the application of Multiple-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) approaches exclusively to water-related freshwater ecosystem services. MCDM analysis has been useful in solving conflicts and it works well in this framework, given the serious conflicts historically associated with water use and the protection of freshwater ecosystems around the world. In this study, we present a review of 150 papers that proposed the use of MCDM-based methods for the social, economic, or ecological planning and management of water ecosystem services over the period 2000–2020. The analysis accounts for six elements: ecosystem service type, method, participation, biogeographical realm, waterbody type, and problem to solve. A Chi-square test was used to identify dependence between these elements. Studies involving the participation of stakeholder groups adopted an integrated approach to analysing sustainable water management, considering provisioning, regulating, and cultural services. However, such studies have been in decline since 2015, in favour of non-participatory studies that were strictly focused on ecological and provisioning issues. Although this reflects greater concern for the health of freshwater ecosystems, it is a long way removed from the essence of ecosystem services, which entails an integrated approach to the interrelationships between hydrology, landscapes, ecology, and humans.

Assessing ecosystem services of mountain lakes

“…To this end, multi-criteria (decision) analysis (MCA) is considered a suitable framework (Langemeyer et al, 2016;Saarikoski et al, 2016), and is increasingly applied in water-related management contexts (e.g. Castro-Pardo et al, 2021;Martínez-López et al, 2019;Marttunen et al, 2022). Drawing on such approaches, this article presents a conceptual framework for ES valuation in the context of mountain lakes using the PROMETH-EE method.…”

An integrated decision-making framework for selecting the best strategies of water resources management in pandemic emergencies

“…de Castro-Pardo et al [30] focused on reviewing nearly 150 papers related to water ecosystem planning and management between 2000 to 2020 which had used various MCDM algorithms for the analysis. Their results showed that most of papers in this field only focused on investigating the factors impacting on water consumption and there were a few papers discussing on managerial aspects of water shortage issue.…”

A fuzzy-DEA water sustainability index: an application in European Union water risk hotspots

“…With the prospect of billions of people facing serious water scarcity problems and associated food shortages, the management of water as a resource requires urgent strategic action. Currently two billion people live in countries with large water deficits and by 2030, 700 million people are expected to be displaced by intense water scarcity (de Castro-Pardo et al, 2021).…”