Assessing Sustainable Rural Development Based on Ecosystem Services Vulnerability

Abstract

<jats:p>Sustainable Rural Development is essential to maintain active local communities and avoid depopulation and degradation of rural areas. Proper assessment of development in these territories is necessary to improve decision-making and to inform public policy, while ensuring biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services supply. Rural areas include high ecological value systems but the vulnerability of environmental components in development indicators has not been sufficiently pinpointed. The main objective of this work was to propose a new sustainable rural development composite indicator (nSRDI) while considering an environmental dimension indicator based on ecosystem services vulnerability and social and economic dimension indicators established using a sequentially Benefit of the Doubt-Data Envelopment Analysis (BoD-DEA) model. It aimed also to test effects of weighting methods on nSRDI. The composite indicator was applied to 10 regions (comarcas) in the Huesca province, Spain, producing a ranking of regions accordingly. The indicator was further tested through the analysis of the effect of an equal and optimum weighting method on scores and rankings of regions. Results showed substantial differences in nSRDI scores/rankings when vulnerability was added to the process, suggesting that the environmental dimension and the perspective from which it is conceived and applied matters when addressing sustainable rural development.</jats:p>

A Historical Perspective of Landscape and Human Population Dynamics in Guimarães (Northern Portugal): Possible Implications of Rural Fire Risk in a Changing Environment

“…Figure 2 shows the location of the municipality of Guimarães in the national and regional framework. According to the data presented in the last census of 2011, the municipality of Guimarães occupies 240.96 km 2 . In this area, there are 158,124 inhabitants, 54,097 of whom live in the city.…”

“…Rural fires affect the interface between natural ecosystems and urban environments, destroying agriculture and forest production capacity and ecosystem services [1][2][3]. The occurrence of fires, especially in Mediterranean-type regions such as Portugal, has a highly negative impact on several areas, such as the economy, through the destruction of property and heritage, and the environment, through the destruction of natural areas [4][5][6].…”

A Goal Programming Model to Guide Decision-Making Processes towards Conservation Consensuses

“…Some studies focused on an ecosystem services approach to guide participatory MCDM processes to improve management strategies in forests, coastal areas, peatlands, mountain protected areas, and rural sites [24][25][26][27][28]. These studies focused on the improvement of management strategies from a participatory multi-criteria approach assessing institutional actors but they did not consider the preferences of private owners.…”

“…AHP is based on the analysis of pairwise comparisons between all the criteria organized in a hierarchical structure and uses the eigenvalue method and the geometric mean to aggregate all the assessments in one single aggregated solution [64]. Prior to aggregation, inconsistences in responses were corrected using a goal programming model based on [65] that has been successfully applied in several studies [2,7,27,28]. Once the inconsistences were corrected, an aggregated assessment was obtained using a geometric mean.…”

A Multiple Criteria Decision Making Approach to Designing Teaching Plans in Higher Education Institutions

“…On the other hand, when decision-making problems need to consider several alternatives from different criteria, the complexity of the aggregation process increases, and it is essential to include the individual valuations with rigor [31]. In this context, a multi-criteria analysis can provide rigor to participative decision-making models when it is essential to ensure minimum objectivity, representativity and transparency in a global and democratic context [32,33].…”