Decision-Making in Forestry: A Review of the Hybridisation of Multiple Criteria and Group Decision-Making Methods

The degree of complexity in forest management has increased in the last few decades, not only due to the inclusion of specific new issues (e.g., climate change, social protection, etc.), but also because these new, as well as classic, issues have to be dealt with in a context characterised by multiple conflicting criteria that are evaluated by different stakeholders. Nowadays, the multicriteria issue enjoys a relatively sound tradition in forest management. However, the consideration of several stakeholders, which requires the formulation of management models within a collective decision-making setting, is not that advanced. This paper aims to provide a critical overview of forestry case studies that have been published in primary journals and that deal with multiple criteria and several stakeholders. Based on this overview, some highlights of the most promising methods were obtained, and recommendations for the fruitful use of these combined methodologies for dealing with numerous types of forest management problems are provided.