Collaborative environmental planning in river management: an application of multicriteria decision analysis in the White River Watershed in Vermont

Multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) provides a well-established family of decision tools to aid stakeholder groups in arriving at collective decisions. MCDA can also function as a framework for the social learning process, serving as an educational aid in decision problems characterized by a high level of public participation. In this paper, the framework and results of a structured decision process using the outranking MCDA methodology preference ranking organization method of enrichment evaluation (PROMETHEE) are presented. PROMETHEE is used to frame multi-stakeholder discussions of river management alternatives for the Upper White River of Central Vermont, in the northeastern United States. Stakeholders met over 10 months to create a shared vision of an ideal river and its services to communities, develop a list of criteria by which to evaluate river management alternatives, and elicit preferences to rank and compare individual and group preferences. The MCDA procedure helped to frame a group process that made stakeholder preferences explicit and substantive discussions about long-term river management possible.     

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The aim of sustainable development is to balance social, economic, and environmental needs. In order to justify the decisions they make, stakeholders must quantify the different impacts found in the operations and developments of companies and/or projects throughout their life cycle. However, as some areas are subjective in nature, the quantification process of the different impacts and the assessment of sustainable development performance become arduous tasks of development, validation, and application of scientific and empirical methods with the intrinsic objective of finding an agreement among the involved parties (i.e., stakeholders). Several environmental and sustainability assessment tools, instruments, processes, and methodologies have been developed; rating systems stand out and have gained attention and credibility, as demonstrated by the vast number of certified projects around the world and the widely-known usefulness and advantages of their application. The Wa-Pa-Su project sustainability rating system presents an integrated approach to sustainability assessment by integrating three distinctive areas of knowledge: (1) sustainable development theory and fundamentals supports the ultimate goal of the rating system, which is to contribute to sustainability, with the aim of finding a path to balance social, economic, and environmental needs; (2) continual performance improvement becomes essential due to the duration of the projects, as it is critical to allow organizations or projects to improve performance over time; and (3) multi-criteria decision analysis assists with the assessment process through stakeholder engagement and participation, and the design and implementation of a criteria weighting system.     

A spatial multicriteria decision making tool to define the best agricultural areas for sewage sludge amendment

Sewage sludge amendment on agricultural soils has recently become a practice of heightened interest, as a consequence of sewage sludge production increase. This practice has benefits to soil and crops, however it may also lead to environmental contamination, depending on the characteristics of the fields. In order to define the suitability of the different agricultural fields to receive sewage sludge, a spatial tool is proposed. This tool, elaborated in GIS platform, aggregates different criteria regarding human exposure and environmental contamination.The spatial tool was applied to a case study in the region of Catalonia (NE of Spain). Within the case study, each step of the tool development is detailed. The results show that the studied region has different suitability degrees, being the appropriate areas sufficient for receiving the total amount of sewage sludge produced. The sensitivity analysis showed that “groundwater contamination”, “distance to urban areas”, “metals concentration in soil” and “crop type” are the most important criteria of the evaluation.The developed tool successfully tackled the problem, providing a comprehensive procedure to evaluate agricultural land suitability to receive sewage sludge as an organic fertilizer. Also, the tool implementation gives insights to decision makers, guiding them to more confident decisions, based on an extensive group of criteria.     

Hospital site selection using fuzzy AHP and its derivatives

Environmental managers are commonly faced with sophisticated decisions, such as choosing the location of a new facility subject to multiple conflicting criteria. This paper considers the specific problem of creating a well-distributed network of hospitals that delivers its services to the target population with minimal time, pollution and cost. We develop a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis process that combines Geographical Information System (GIS) analysis with the Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP), and use this process to determine the optimum site for a new hospital in the Tehran urban area. The GIS was used to calculate and classify governing criteria, while FAHP was used to evaluate the decision factors and their impacts on alternative sites. Three methods were used to estimate the total weights and priorities of the candidate sites: fuzzy extent analysis, center-of-area defuzzification, and the α-cut method. The three methods yield identical priorities for the five alternatives considered. Fuzzy extent analysis provides less discriminating power, but is simpler to implement and compute than the other two methods. The α-cut method is more complicated, but integrates the uncertainty and overall attitude of the decision-maker. The usefulness of the new hospital site is evaluated by computing an accessibility index for each pixel in the GIS, defined as the ratio of population density to travel time. With the addition of a new hospital at the optimum site, this index improved over about 6.5 percent of the geographical area.     

Optimized forest degradation model (OFDM): an environmental decision support system for environmental impact assessment using an artificial neural network

The purpose of this article is Artificial Neural Network (ANN) modeling using ecological and associated factors with forest degradation to predict the degradation of ecosystem, thereby enabling us to assess the environmental impacts of forest projects as an Environmental Decision Support System (EDSS). Results of the Multi-Layer Feed-Forward Network (MLFN), trained for Optimized Forest Degradation Model (OFDM), indicate that the performance of OFDM is more than other degradation models. Changes in forest management activities with higher value in sensitivity analysis help forest managers to decrease OFDM entity and environment impacts. The system is an intelligent EDSS, which allows the decision-maker to model criteria in forest degradation in order to reach and employ the optimal allocation plan. Considering results, multi criteria decision analysis (MCDA) approaches based on ANN, is an encouraging and robust method for solving MCDA problems.