Title: Modelling different views of sustainability of forestry in Finland

Authors: Seppo Vehkamaki, Stefan Backman

Addresses: Department of Economics and Management, University of Helsinki, Helsinki 00170, Finland. ' Department of Economics and Management, University of Helsinki, Helsinki 00170, Finland

Abstract: During the last decades, the concept of sustainability has been diversified into economic, ecological and social subcategories. In this study, sustainability is evaluated in the case of three groups having different views on sustainability: government (GOV), forest industry (FI) and nature conservationists. Regional indicators of sustainability are utilised as basic data. From them, the authors choose indicator sets for each group. By means of fuzzy C-means clustering three views on sustainability were formed. The membership grades of clusters were analysed by means of Spearman rank correlation analysis and correspondence analysis. The main results are that the views of the GOV and FI coincide in the available data and there is a bargaining situation in society between economic and nature conservation views.

Keywords: forestry; regional sustainability indicators; fuzzy C-means; FCM clustering; membership grade; Spearman rank correlation; correspondence analysis; Finland; sustainable development; forest industry; government; nature conservation; fuzzy logic.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2011.042537

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2011 Vol.9 No.1, pp.34 - 48

Published online: 07 Feb 2015 *

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