Making decision about the environment, especially forest resources management, often involves the balancing of conflicting, incommensurate and incompatible values of many users and uses of a resource. Therefore, one of the most fundamental and difficult tasks involved is the effective integration or synthesis of all valuesenvironmental, economic and social, which is a necessary first step to achieve and maintain ecologically sustainable development. This research shows Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) as a potential decision-making tool in forest resources management. Three levels of hierarchy were developed with goal at the highest level, followed by criteria and alternative. Criteria were chosen based on the Malaysian Criteria and Indicator (2002) for assessment of sustainable forest management. Using this technique, the determination of priority for all the alternatives will be considered and where the option of forest resources use with highest priority value is more suitable to be implemented will be verified.

Over the last decade, Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) emerged as a dominant forest management paradigm (Kant and Lee, 2004). Unlike the conventional commodity-based resource management paradigm, SFM focuses on sustainable commodity production, conservation, amenity values, and long-term sustainability of forests, where larger spatial scales and longer time periods are accommodated (Clark, 2004). Sustainable Forest Management is now defined as stewardship and use of forests and forest land in a way, and at a rate, that maintains their biodiversity, productivity, generation capacity, vitality, and their potential to fulfill now and in the future, relevant ecological, economic, and social functions (Wolfslehner et al., 2005). Formulating SFM involves balancing complex economic, sociopolitical and environmental aspects. More importantly, SFM represents a shift from `management by exclusion' to `management by inclusion' (Kant and Lee, 2004). Collaborative decision-making processes have been proposed to achieve a more inclusive resource management (Wondolleck and Yaffee, 2000).

The concept of SFM derived impetus from several waves of global development, including the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (1992), held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests (1995-1997); the Intergovernmental Forum on Forests (1997-2000); and the United Nations Forum on Forests (2001) (Wang, 2004). Compared to the conventional forest management, SFM is interdisciplinary, heterogeneous, less hierarchical and more socially accountable.

Forest resource planning is a very complex problem mainly due to the multiplicity of a wide range of criteria involved in the underlying decision-making process (Luis and Carlos, 2008). Thus, every decision made affects criteria of different nature like, (a) Economic issues (e.g., timber, forage, livestock, hunting, etc.); (b) Environmental issues (e.g., soil erosion, carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation, etc.); and (c) Social issues (e.g., recreational activities, level of employment, population settlement, etc.).

Environmental Sciences Journal, Decision Making Techniques, Forest Management, Resource Management, Carbon Sequestration, Decision Making Process, Spatial Decision Support System, Geographic Information Systems, Knowledge Acquisition Process, Animal Species, Forest Management Planning.