 Welcome to the first video of the virtual training module on how to use analytical hierarchy process or HP as a tool to analyze trade-offs in land-use decision-making. I'm Xiao Ting Ho-Jiong, senior researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development. Together with Professor Adam Ranwick from Lincoln University in New Zealand, we'll guide you through this virtual training module through a series of videos complemented by reading materials and learning questions. So let's start by looking at what is HP, why are we making a virtual training for it? We all make a lot of decisions consciously or unconsciously on daily basis, and many of them involve making choices, we're achieving one objective, may involve compromises on other objectives or what we call a trade-off. For example, we may all aim to spend more time with family, build our career with more interesting books and do exercise, but we only have limited time in a day and choosing to spend more time with family may often mean that we do not have as much time as we would want to do exercise or work. I'm sure that you can also think of many other examples with doing one thing and achieving one aim means some sacrifice and compromising other areas, and the land use is one of those examples. Land management decisions often involve many trade-offs because there are many competing uses for the limited resource. For example, using land for timber, for conservation, for agricultural production. In addition, many different stakeholders may be using the same patch of land and could have different priorities and preferences on how they may wish the land to be used. As population grows and the natural resources string those due to over-exploitation and impacts of climate change, we have seen increasing conflicts amongst different land use objectives, and those who make the land use decisions increasingly have to make difficult choices and try to balance multiple social, environmental and economic goals. That's why it's also increasingly important for researchers, policymakers and other decision makers to better understand and manage those trade-offs. And in this training module, we will together explore how analytical hierarchy process or HP can be used to support researchers who want to do that. HP is one of the most applied multi-criterion analysis that can support decision makers to analyze trade-off among multiple and competing objectives and make informed decisions that explicitly acknowledge those trade-offs. You can learn more about the theory, the process and other details of HP through the reading materials provided as part of the module one. In this video, I mainly want to focus on the advantages and disadvantages of using HP to understand land use trade-offs and support land use decision-making to help you decide whether HP is the right tool for you or not. Similarly, with other types of multi-criterion analysis, HP can analyze qualitative as well as quantitative factors considering a decision-making process. This is a bigger advantage for using multi-criterion analysis like HP in supporting decision-making about natural resources, including land. As those tools do not require putting monetary or economic values on social and environmental objectives, which are inherently not suitable, therefore very difficult to be valued solely in economic terms. Comparing to other multi-criterion decision-making tools, HP also has its unique advantages in analyzing and understanding trade-offs in land use decision-making. Firstly, it's relatively easy to use comparing to other multi-criterion decision-making tools that often are only used by experts and require more complex computing skills. HP uses simple pairwise comparisons between different objectives and can be used in a participatory manner with decision-makers. Researchers can use it to interview stakeholders and ask them to just indicate the relative importance of one objective to the other. So it's easily understandable by most stakeholders. It can be applied with individuals or in group settings, which is important for land use decision-making because some of the decisions are made by multiple stakeholders. Secondly, HP starts with clarifying the purpose and objectives of a decision and requires users to clarify the factors or criteria that will be considered in the decision-making process. It does not require predefined possible decision outcomes, therefore can be used for a variety of research purposes ranging from supporting strategic decision-making to just investigating the drivers of decision-making process and the trade-offs involved in that process, regardless of the final decision made. We will look at those different uses and some specific examples later in this module. Thirdly, HP acknowledges that decisions involve many objectives and the criteria that need to be traded off. While we all make decisions that involve trade-offs, we may not be familiar with the term, nor do we make those decisions consciously. HP provides a simple framework to help us think through those trade-offs by comparing each objective or criteria in relative terms. When using HP in a participatory manner, researchers can use the process to engage interviewees in discussion of trade-offs in land use decision-making without necessarily having to use the term. By encouraging the interviewees to rank relative importance of different objective or criteria, researchers can more easily help the stakeholders discuss why one objective or criteria is viewed as more important than the other, therefore understand better stakeholders' preference and how they may make land use decisions and involve those trade-offs. In addition, HP also recognizes that human perception and judgment of relative importance of each factor could be inconsistent. This allows researchers to detect and reduce inconsistency. You can find out how to do so in the reading materials as well as in module 2. As you will learn in this virtual training, by using participatory approach, HP can generate both quantitative and qualitative research results. For example, the relative importance of different criteria using land use decision-making can be captured in radar graphs as shown on the top corner of the slide. This type of graphics are easy for a different stakeholder to understand and visualize trade-offs amongst those different objectives. The graphics can also be used by researchers to engage interviewees in discussing and validating research results and they may help review additional qualitative insights on land use trade-offs in those decisions. You can see an example of those types of qualitative results on the bottom corner of the slide. Thanks to those advantages, HP has been widely used by both public and private sectors in practice to aid multi-quite theory decisions. It has also been used widely for issues related to sustainability, conservation, and land management. So there's a wealth of experience to draw from. There are many publications, real-life examples, online tools, and guidance on HP. In this training module, we focus on HP's application land use trade-off analysis. We have selected some most relevant and easy to understand the reading material for you and included them along with complementary video tutorials like this one. You can also find additional resources at the end of the virtual training webpage. HP, of course, also has its limitations. The most important ones include, if there are too many criteria involved in decision-making process, the number of pairwise comparisons can become very large and then interviews can become very long. We will discuss this more in detail in module two. Another disadvantage of HP method is that the artificial limitation of the use of nine-point skills. Sometimes, interviewees may find it very complicated or too hard to distinguish amongst the number. For example, whether one criterion is six or seven times more important than the other, sometimes a criterion can be a red line for decision-maker, which means that that criteria simply can't be traded off with other criteria. Though this can be addressed by choosing the number nine, which means that one criteria is extremely important comparing to the other. And this choice can be supplemented by qualitative information in discussing your research result. You will also learn more about this in module two. In HP, how you set the hierarchy and choose the criteria is really important. And sometimes this can be tricky to get it right, especially if you want to use HP to help make a decision rather than just investigating drivers of decisions and trade-offs involved. For example, if you have too many criteria that are correlated and interdependent, it may also cause redundancies, double counting and more inconsistency in the result that you get. Though in that case, you may wish to learn more about the analytic network process or AMP, which is an adapted version of HP that can deal with those independence amongst criteria. If you want to use HP to help make a decision, you will also need to know a set of land-use options and how to pre-select those options can be tricky if you do not know what options you already have. But you can combine HP with other methodology in practice to help you identify those options. For example, maps that include land suitability and availability information. In module two, you will also learn some challenges and key issues to look out for in the practical application of HP and how you may address them. So please do review the additional reading materials provided with this video. Together, they should be able to help you decide whether HP is a useful tool for you or not to achieve your research objectives. In the next video, we will look at the wide range of application of HP and some examples of how it is used to analyze trade-offs in land-use decision-making. Thanks for your attention. I really hope to see you in the next video.