For well-founded decisions in sustainable timber harvesting, it is important to know the preferences of different stakeholders. The concept of sustainable timber harvesting is to incorporate economic, social, and environmental criteria. In a previous study, 33 criteria were identified by forest experts as relevant for evaluating sustainability. To assess the importance of these criteria, an online survey was conducted among Austrian stakeholders between April and May 2023, in which 610 people were invited to participate and which resulted in a response rate of 47%. The survey participants were primarily male (94%), with an average age of 47 and an average of 20 years of work experience. The key criteria for sustainable harvesting that were unanimously mentioned by the stakeholders on the basis of a Likert scale, included occupational hazards, residual stand damage, loss of wood quality due to poor work performance, biomass regeneration, water erosion, noise exposure, soil rutting, physical workload, working conditions, and vibration exposure. Younger or less experienced workers generally rated the criteria as less important than older and more experienced workers. These identified preferences will inform the development of a decision support model for sustainable timber harvesting using these criteria as input parameters.

The Chinese economy is one of the largest and most dynamic economies in the world. Over the past few decades, China has experienced rapid economic growth from agrarian to industrial powerhouse fueled by manufacturing, exports, and services. However, this rapid growth has also brought about challenges, including environmental issues like water contamination. The indulgence of cadmium metal in regular used water can cause serious health issues, including kidney damage and cancer. Many strategies have been implemented for treatment of water contamination. The main focus of this research is to introduce a novel methodology for treatment of cadmium contaminated water problem in China. This study seeks to demonstrate the multi-criteria group decision-making ability based on the outranking relations within the confines of a contemporary, well- organized and extremely flexible model of spherical fuzzy rough numbers. Spherical fuzzy rough numbers, amalgamation of rough numbers with traditional spherical fuzzy numbers, make the use of membership, nonmembership and neutral membership degrees along with the manipulation of the subjectivity and reliance on objective uncertainties. The combination of spherical fuzzy rough numbers with an outranking multi-criteria group decision making technique, Elimination and Choice Expressing Reality, integrates spherical fuzzy logic to handle uncertainty and imprecision in multi-criteria decision-making. This approach captures degrees of uncertainty and hesitancy with spherical fuzzy numbers, improving the handling of imprecise information. The working mechanism involves generation of outranking relations among alternatives by comparing predominant and subdominant options, calculating score degrees, concordance and discordance sets, and incorporating subjective spherical fuzzy rough criteria weights. Unlike traditional methods that use crisp or conventional fuzzy numbers, this technique provides a more reliable and flexible evaluation by integrating rough set theory for better handling of imprecision and uncertainty. Finally, an outranking graph is drawn that points from the supreme option to inferior one. The legitimacy of the proposed technique is, then, testified by making its comparison with other existing techniques.