Environmental Decision Making

Making decisions about environmental policy often involves balancing conflicting, incommensurate and incompatible values of many users and uses of a resource. One of the most fundamental and difficult tasks involved, therefore, is the effective integration or synthesis of all values related to the resource issue in question. It is now realised that consideration and effective integration of all resource values, whether they are environmental, economic or social, is a necessary first step to achieving and maintaining ecologically sustainable development. In this thesis it is argued that MCA has many advantages as a decision-aiding process for the environment than some other contemporary and traditionally used methods. The research outlines a practical application of Multi-criteria Analysis to the integration of various forest values in the Regional Forest Agreement process using stakeholders from one of the assessment regions. This case study has been undertaken in parallel to the official approach adopted by governments to the decision-making process and shows a comparison of the results.