Green Economy Indicators for Prioritizing Tourism Sites in a World Natural Heritage: An Integrated Fuzzy AHP - Fuzzy TOPSIS Assessment of the Cat Ba Archipelago (Vietnam)

This study develops an integrated Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (Fuzzy AHP) and Fuzzy Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (Fuzzy TOPSIS) framework for prioritizing tourism sites according to green economy objectives in Vietnam’s Cat Ba Archipelago, part of a world natural heritage site in Vietnam. A purposively selected panel of 10 decision-makers evaluates 10 tourism sites against 10 environmental, economic, social, and institutional criteria. Fuzzy AHP determines the relative importance of the criteria, while Fuzzy TOPSIS assesses the sites according to their proximity to the fuzzy positive ideal solution. The results identify natural capital management as the most important criterion, followed by policy guidelines and resource benefit distribution, highlighting a conservation-led pathway in which ecosystem protection, enforceable environmental limits, and equitable benefit sharing are central to green tourism development. Sensitivity analysis confirms that the overall ranking pattern remains stable across the tested weighting scenarios. The findings further show that higher priority does not imply faster tourism expansion; rather, interventions should be differentiated according to local ecological conditions, infrastructure, institutional capacity, and livelihood needs. The proposed framework advances community-level spatial prioritization by linking multidimensional green economy criteria with site-specific intervention strategies. It provides a transparent decision-support tool for allocating green tourism and environmental-management interventions and is adaptable to other ecologically sensitive island and coastal destinations.