Journal
SUSTAINABILITY
Volume 13, Issue 17, Pages -Publisher
MDPI
DOI: 10.3390/su13179485
Keywords
Venice Lagoon; ecosystem services; salt marsh; cultural landscape; world heritage site; analytic hierarchy process; ranking; pairwise comparisons
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Coastal ecosystems are economically valuable but highly threatened by climate changes and human pressure. Proposed application-driven method to support decision-makers in cost-effective incentive policies for ecosystem preservation.
Coastal ecosystems are among the most economically valuable and highly threatened on Earth; they provide valuable ecosystem services (ESs) but are severely exposed to climate changes and human pressure. Although the preservation of coastal ecosystems is of the utmost importance, it is often sub-optimally pursued by Governments and Societies because of the high costs involved. We consider salt-marsh ecosystems in the Venice Lagoon as an example of a threatened landscape, calling for innovative, integrated management strategies, and propose an application-driven methodological framework to support policymakers in the identification of cost-effective incentive policies to ecosystem preservation. By combining group decision-making and Value-Focused-Thinking approaches, we provide a multiple-criteria decision model, based on pairwise comparisons, to identify which ESs are top-priority policy targets according to a cost-effective perspective. We implemented an online Delphi survey process and interviewed a pool of experts who identified recreation and tourism, coastal protection from flooding, carbon storage, biodiversity and landscape, and nursery habitats for fisheries as the five most relevant ESs for the Venice Lagoon taking into consideration the Environmental, Economic, and Social perspectives. Our results suggest that the Environmental perspective is the most important criteria, whereas biodiversity and landscape is acknowledged as the most important ES.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available