MULTIPLE CRITERIA LAND-USE ANALYSIS

Since the early 1980s, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the Un ited Nations (FAG) and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) have been collaborating on expanding FAO's Agro-Ecol ogical Zones (AEZ) methodology of land resources appraisal by incorpor ating decision support tools for optimizing the use of land resources. Initially, these tools consisted of the application of linear optimiz ation techniques for analyzing land-use scenarios with regard to singl e objective functions, such as maximizing argicultural production or m inimizing the cost of production under specific physical environmental and socio-economic conditions and constraints. Often, the specificati on of a single objective function does not adequately reflect the pref erences of decision-makers, which are of a multiobjective nature in ma ny practical problems dealing with resources. Multicriteria optimizati on approaches address problem definitions and solutions in a more real istic way and have recently been applied by FAO and IIASA in a land re sources appraisal study in Kenya. In this study, optimization techniqu es coupled with multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) techniques, usi ng the Aspiration-Reservation Based Decision Support (ARBDS) approach, have been used to analyze various land use scenarios, considering sim ultaneously several objectives such as maximizing revenues from crop a nd livestock production, maximizing district self-reliance in agricult ural production, minimizing costs of production and environmental dama ges from erosion. The main users of the new tool being developed, whic h combines AEZ and MCDA, are expected to be natural resources analysts and managers, land-use planners, ecologists, environmentalists, econo mists at national and regional levels, and agricultural extensionists at the local scale. (C) Elsevier Science Inc., 1997.