Land planning planning and risk assessment for livestock production based on an outranking approach and GIS

The new European regulatory requirements incorporate territorial livestock planning as a key element to correct risks for the sector, for the nearby population and for the environment. The risk potential is high in areas with greater livestock density, and in addition, its detection is more complex. The objective of this study is to propose and validate a methodology to assess the risk of livestock farms, considering sectorial, social and environmental criteria. The methodology is based on the integration of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and multi-criteria tools. GIS is essential to obtain spatial data due to the location of the farms and to represent the results of the multicriteria analysis geographically. PROMETHEE, a multicriteria outranking method, has been applied to evaluate the risks of livestock farms, where the weights of different criteria have been obtained by using the AHP method from a group of experts. The method has also been applied to a region with areas of high cattle density with intensive production systems, composed of 4983 farms from the following species: cattle, horses, pigs, poultry, rabbits, sheep and goats. The region studied is the Valencian Community (VC) in the east of Spain. The results provide a global risk indicator for each livestock farm, which assesses the sectorial, environmental and social risks. In addition, the most problematic areas and livestock species for the region have been identified, which are characterized by intensive livestock farms. These results provide valuable information to design and apply better sectorial, social and environmental policies by public administrations, which are responsible for the management of livestock activities and the territory, to reduce the risks for the populations associated with livestock production.