Making Decisions in a Sustainable Development Context: A State-of-the-Art Survey and Proposal of a Multi-period Single Synthesizing Criterion Approach

Making sustainable decisions is a major concern for government departments seeking to develop best practices and innovative methods to deal with complex decision-making problems. This article is concerned with decision-making in sustainable development contexts, which must guarantee a long-term balance between environmental integrity, social equality and economic efficiency, in addition to evaluating options over the short, medium and long term. This article provides an up-to-date survey of research that evaluates the sustainability of decisions and puts forward an innovative multi-period single synthesizing criterion approach for selecting projects in sustainable development contexts. The proposed approach is then used to select the best compromise out of several sustainable forest management options while considering economic benefits, environmental impact and decision-maker preferences.