Sustainable Rural Development is essential to maintain active local communities and avoid depopulation and degradation of rural areas. Proper assessment of development in these territories is necessary to improve decision-making and to inform public policy, while ensuring biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services supply. Rural areas include high ecological value systems but the vulnerability of environmental components in development indicators has not been sufficiently pinpointed. The main objective of this work was to propose a new sustainable rural development composite indicator (nSRDI) while considering an environmental dimension indicator based on ecosystem services vulnerability and social and economic dimension indicators established using a sequentially Benefit of the Doubt-Data Envelopment Analysis (BoD-DEA) model. It aimed also to test effects of weighting methods on nSRDI. The composite indicator was applied to 10 regions (comarcas) in the Huesca province, Spain, producing a ranking of regions accordingly. The indicator was further tested through the analysis of the effect of an equal and optimum weighting method on scores and rankings of regions. Results showed substantial differences in nSRDI scores/rankings when vulnerability was added to the process, suggesting that the environmental dimension and the perspective from which it is conceived and applied matters when addressing sustainable rural development.

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the application of Multiple-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) approaches exclusively to water-related freshwater ecosystem services. MCDM analysis has been useful in solving conflicts and it works well in this framework, given the serious conflicts historically associated with water use and the protection of freshwater ecosystems around the world. In this study, we present a review of 150 papers that proposed the use of MCDM-based methods for the social, economic, or ecological planning and management of water ecosystem services over the period 2000–2020. The analysis accounts for six elements: ecosystem service type, method, participation, biogeographical realm, waterbody type, and problem to solve. A Chi-square test was used to identify dependence between these elements. Studies involving the participation of stakeholder groups adopted an integrated approach to analysing sustainable water management, considering provisioning, regulating, and cultural services. However, such studies have been in decline since 2015, in favour of non-participatory studies that were strictly focused on ecological and provisioning issues. Although this reflects greater concern for the health of freshwater ecosystems, it is a long way removed from the essence of ecosystem services, which entails an integrated approach to the interrelationships between hydrology, landscapes, ecology, and humans.

Investment in natural capital is increasingly necessary and urgent considering the increasing loss of global bio- diversity and the associated social and economic losses. Ecosystem services are tools for quantifying the stock of natural capital and there is great concern about their assessment and valuation. However, there remains a substantial gap between the large amount of information available about ecosystem services and the infor- mation required to support decisions and this undermines the efficiency of their management. Multi-criteria analysis techniques can be very useful to efficiently develop decision-making processes to properly channel investment and optimize the costs associated with conservation. This paper proposes an innovative mixed methodology for multi-criteria analysis to assign priorities to ecosystem services in protected areas in terms of importance and vulnerability. The model was applied by a group of experts to prioritize 20 ecosystem services in the Ordesa and Monte Perdido National Park. In order to collect and analyze the individual valuations, a mixed method of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Goal Programming (GP) was used, and to aggregate the valuation criteria, a Joint Relevance Index (JRI) was used, which presents the relative importance of each service in an aggregated way. The results show that conservation policies should be primarily directed towards lifecycle maintenance and water conditions. Depending on the vulnerability of the services, conservation poli- cies should be channeled towards provisioning services related to wild animals and wild plants. Considering the relative importance of services in the park, priority should be oriented to lifecycle maintenance, water conditions and intellectual interaction with the environment.