Advancing Occupational Safety in Forest Management Through a New GIS-AHP Integrated Framework

The concept of sustainable forest management considers various forest functions, each with unique values and interests in harmony with social, economic, and ecological needs. However, the philosophical meaning of sustainable forest management concepts has still not been fully implemented. The core concept often focuses solely on the forest without considering the forestry workers as a management goal. On the other hand, forestry work is associated with a high risk to the occupational safety of the workers. Therefore, an improvement in occupational safety protection for forest worker is a must. This study aimed to introduce a new concept for assessing the level of vulnerability to occupational accidents by utilizing remote sensing as a tool to detect natural hazards as a factor causing work accidents from the environment. In this new concept, 12 parameters of natural hazards were selected based on their relevance to occupational safety in forest management and their potential impact on risk assessment, including slope, elevation, soil type, vegetation density, accessibility, rainfall, temperature, wind speed, sunlight intensity, humidity, wildlife potential, and abnormal tree condition (leaning tree, dead trees, brittle trees, and fallen trees). Implementing this new concept in an 85,855 ha forest area showed that the occupational safety risk class level highly agrees with conventional ground checks. This fact indicates that this method can provide information related to various sources of natural hazards in a faster, cheaper, more accessible, and more accurate manner.