Evaluation of the European experts on the application of the AHP method in sustainable forest management

To apply the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to solve forest management problems, it is necessary to determine when the use of this method is appropriate and when another method would be more appropriate due to the limitations of the method itself. In this study, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) and meta-SWOT analyses were conducted to assess the applicability of the AHP method to sustainable forest management problems. Sixteen experts from 11 different European countries participated in the research. First, they evaluated the AHP method from the SWOT perspective and weighted the SWOT factors and groups using the AHP method. The results showed that the AHP method is more suitable for application in sustainable forest management than other multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) methods with respect to two competitive dimensions: design and calculation. However, the application of the AHP in sustainable forest management also has some weaknesses and threats that should be considered. Involving stakeholders with expertise and skills in model development and pairwise comparisons is the most important issue in this area; otherwise, incorrect results could be obtained for forest management decisions. Problem-solving conditions such as uncertainty, the interactions among criteria and the economic constraints of the problem may also lead to the use of other methods instead of the AHP in sustainable forest management. The results of this study contribute to global studies on decision-making in natural resource and environmental management, especially decisions related to forest management.