Guiding sustainable land use planning in Ethiopia: A decision support framework using analytic hierarchy process

• Land use decision priorities vary slightly among policymakers, local experts, and farmers. • Landscape protection and management receive high priority among the sub-indicators, which play a significant role in implementing FLR. • Policymakers should widen the objective of FLR options toward holistic landscape management. • Clearly defined and impactful indicators can align stakeholder perspectives and facilitate consensus-driven decision-making. • The findings highlight key factors for prioritizing sustainable and use decision-making. Land use planning in countries like Ethiopia faces persistent challenges, including outdated technical standards, fragmented institutional coordination, and limited community participation. These issues are particularly pronounced in land use and watershed development initiatives. In the implementation of Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR), emphasis is often placed on restoring ecological functions, mitigating land degradation, reducing soil erosion, and enhancing carbon sequestration than local community well-being. Therefore, adopting a holistic approach is essential when approaching land use decisions, carefully considering various factors that influence land use decisions. This study seeks to develop a multi-stakeholder land use decision support framework that integrates environmental, social, and economic dimensions to inform land use planning decision-making processes in Ethiopia. To achieve this objective, the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) model, a Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) method, is applied. We organized four workshops with different stakeholders, including farmers and experts from woreda, zonal, and federal levels. In the workshops, land use decision factors at the indicator and sub-indicator levels were developed, and a ranking of these decision factors was applied using the AHP matrix. Results show that a higher degree of consistency is achieved in the matrix with a Consistency Ratio (CR) of 0.01, as determined by federal-level experts. A tolerable CR of 0.01 is also achieved with farmers’ criteria ranking. Although respective stakeholders have varying priorities, in general, climatic, economic, and environmental factors are among the top three, showing high priority weights above 0.4. A sensitivity analysis of the priority weights is conducted, and sensitive factors are identified, which are then used to develop a decision support tree for land use factor prioritization. The decision tree highlights seven critical sub-factors that hold a priority weight above 0.4 and are sensitive at the threshold level of 0.01. Selecting well-defined and compelling indicators will help align stakeholder perspectives and foster consensus in decision-making.