The Sustainable Management of Land and Fisheries Resources Using Multicriteria Techniques: A Meta-Analysis

Abstract

In recent years modern societies have attached a multifunctional requirement to the use of renewable resources, making their optimal sustainable management more complex. In the last decades, in many cases, this complexity is addressed by formulating management models with the help of the concepts and methods belonging to the well-known multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) paradigm. The purpose of this paper was to undertake a hermeneutic meta-analysis of the literature provided in primary journals on issues related to the management of these resources with the help of the MCDM paradigm. In this way, the paper aimed to obtain new, basic insights with considerations that might improve the efficiency of future research in the field studied. The meta-analysis was implemented by formulating and testing a battery of hypotheses of how the MCDM methods have been used in the past for the formulation of management models for the type of resource analyzed.

An analysis of the degree of circularity of the wood products industry in Europe

“…Furthermore, one of the hypotheses implicit in this work is that, unlike other studies related to the wood‐based industry (Diaz‐Balteiro et al., 2011), or CE (Skvarciany et al., 2021), the same weight has been given to each indicator. That is, none of the different methods appearing in the literature either to elicit the weights or to aggregate them have been addressed (Diaz‐Balteiro, Iglesias‐Merchan, et al., 2020). Although, initially, it was contemplated to include a sensitivity analysis related to the idea of giving hypothetical weights to the indicators, this was not done, basically due to length constraints.…”

“…A good example is the use of MCDM techniques to approach sustainability issues. The bibliography on this field is much more extensive (Diaz‐Balteiro et al., 2017), and this concept appears in a quarter of the studies that, using MCDM techniques, have been performed on renewable resources management in the past few years (Diaz‐Balteiro, Iglesias‐Merchan, et al., 2020). However, despite this boom, these techniques are not always applied consistently (Diaz‐Balteiro et al., 2018).…”

On sustainable improvements of agricultural practices in the Bairrada region (Portugal)

“…These are related to efficiency gains in the provision of public goods from agricultural systems; the development of rural areas by using MDCA to support decision makers in selecting locations for biofuel production plants that could increase farm income; the use of recycled water in agriculture areas with water scarcity problems; the assessment of farmers' readiness to implement precision agriculture practices and the integration of MCDA with other tools like life-cycle assessment analysis to resolve sustainability problems related to the agricultural sector. To give an idea of the dynamic in the applicability of MCDA, the recent work by Diaz-Balteiro et al (2020) includes a literature review on the application of MCDA in the management of land and fisheries resources. They look at 628 papers, 323 of which are from the agricultural sector.…”

“…A range of methods is available to resolve the MCDA. Diaz-Balteiro et al (2020) argue that the choice of the MCDA method "is made, in most cases, in a somewhat arbitrary way" and there are positive and negative arguments associated with each method. Talukder (2016) considers that, of the different MCDA resolution methods, some are more appropriate to agricultural problems, giving the reasons for his statements.…”

Representative Group Decision-Making in Forest Management: A Compromise Approach

“…In sum, the hybridisation of multicriteria techniques with group decision ones to tackle forest management problems constitutes a useful solution, into which diverse techniques have been integrated [5][6][7]. Even recently, it has been seen that the joint use of this group of techniques has increased throughout the time in different land and fishery issues [8].…”