Stakeholders' analysis to assessment indicators of sustainable management of forests (Case Study: Lorestan Province, Kuhdasht County)

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Ph.D. Student, Department of Forestry, Sari University of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources

2 University of Natural Resources and Agriculture Sciences of Sari

3 Sari University of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources

4 Ph.D. student of Natural Resources Engineering Department, Forest Group, Sari University of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources

Abstract

Background and objectives: One of the important factors in planning and decision making for sustainable forest management in the context of sustainable development is assessment stakeholders and their attitudes towards forest sustainability criteria. The seven benchmarks of the Near East process for sustainable management of Iranian forests include: the size of forest resources, biodiversity, forest health and survival, forest resource production functions, forest resource conservation functions, socio-economic functions, and the legal, political and organizational framework. Following the Rio International Conference, sustainable development in Europe, held by the Ministerial Conference on Forest Conservation in Europe, became sustainable forest management, and since then the definition of sustainable forest management has been applied and more than a series Criteria and indicators were used as a tool for assessing sustainable forest management (26). The instrumental criterion for measuring the principle is Iswanuto (2001) and instrumental tool for measuring the criterion (22, 33). In order to make decisions for management and planning, in line with the principled and successful policy of natural resources, full understanding of forest managers and their identification criteria is very important. Decisions in natural resources management due to the multivariate nature of the services and benefits of natural resources, the difficulty of valuing the services of indigenous people and the involvement of a large number of stakeholders are often accompanied by complexity, irreversibility and uncertainty, and the decision Challenges have always been challenged (3). People, resources and partnerships form the three pillars of sustainable development (42).
Materials and methods: The purpose of this study was to compare the attitudes of different forest managers in identifying sustainable management indicators in a part of central Zagros forests located in Kuhdasht city in west of Lorestan province. The practitioners included individuals from local communities, executive experts, and university professors who were selected through field studies and bibliographic studies. In this regard, 50 questionnaires were distributed among practitioners. Cronbach's alpha and SPSS16 software were used to determine the reliability of the questionnaires. Likert scale was used to evaluate the responses. Then, the status of the importance of the most important indicator of each criterion, proportional to its relative weight, was obtained from the attitude of three groups of forestry practitioners.
Results and Conclusion: The results showed that the reliability of the questionnaire was 0.729, which is indicative of acceptable reliability. Evaluation of the results of the opinions of the groups for each criterion and its related indicators showed that the two criteria for "protective functions" and "health, happiness and integrity" are the same. Finally, in order to investigate the significant relationship between the attitude of the practitioners, the Chi-I test or binomial test were used which did not show any significant difference between the attitudes of the three groups.

Keywords

Main Subjects

References

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Pages 117-132

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