Group Analytic Hierarchy Process Sorting II Method: an Application to Evaluate the Economic Value of a Wine Regions Landscape

In the ongoing context of climate change, there is an increasing need to support decision-making processes in the domain of landscape planning and management. Suitable evaluation techniques are needed to take into account the interests of actors and stakeholders in shared policy decisions. An important methodological contribution to the field is given by the Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), due to its ability to combine multiple aspects of a decision problem with the values and opinions expressed by different Decision Makers. The present paper develops the “Group Analytic Hierarchy Process Sorting II method” (GAHPSort II), which aims to sort a group of municipalities included in the UNESCO site “Vineyard Landscape of Piedmont: Langhe-Roero, and Monferrato” (Italy) according to the economic attractiveness of the landscape. Extending the previous versions AHPSort I, AHPSort II and GAHPSort, the GAHPSort II optimizes multi-stakeholder evaluations on large databases by reducing the number of comparisons. Moreover, the GAHPSort II method is proposed as a novel spatial decision support system because it combines a set of economic indicators for landscape and GIS methods for aiding the Decision Makers to better understand the case study and to support the definition and localization of policies and strategies of landscape planning and management.