Application of the analytic hierarchy process to riparian revegetation policy options |
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Authors: | Email author" target="_blank">M?E?QureshiEmail author S?R?Harrison |
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Institution: | (1) CRC Sustainable Sugar Production, James Cook University, 4810 Townsville, Qld, Australia;(2) School of Economics, and Rainforest CRC, The University of Queensland, 4072, Qld, Australia;(3) Present address: Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE), Australia;(4) Principal Research Economist, ABARE, GPO Box 1563, 2601 Canberra, ACT, Australia |
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Abstract: | While riparian vegetation can play a major role in protecting land, water and natural habitat in catchments, there are high
costs associated with tree planting and establishment and in diverting land from cropping. The distribution of costs and benefits
of riparian revegetation creates conflicts in the objectives of various stakeholder groups, and elicitation of importance
weights of objectives and determination of rankings of a number of policy options by these stakeholder groups becomes critical
in decision-making. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is a multicriteria analysis technique that provides an appropriate
tool to accommodate the conflicting views of various stakeholder groups. The AHP allows the users to assess the relative importance
of multiple criteria (or multiple alternatives against a given criterion) in an intuitive manner. This paper presents an application
of AHP to obtain preference weights of environmental, social and economic objectives which have been used in ranking riparian
revegetation policy options in a small catchment (watershed) in north Queensland, Australia. The preference weights towards
environmental, economic and social objectives have been obtained for the various stakeholder groups (landholders, representatives
of local sugar mill staff, environmentalists, recreational fishers and the local community). The AHP technique has proved
useful in eliciting objectives and ranking policy options as well as in checking for consistency of the statements of stakeholder
groups. Implementation of this approach requires a complex data elicitation process. |
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Keywords: | multicriteria analysis AHP stakeholders priorities riparian vegetation revegetation |
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