Forecasting Up to Year 2000 on Shanghai's Environmental Quality

The capabilities of third world countries in dealing withenvironmental problems are often limited by available resources and the tremendous costs of environmental monitoring.This paper attempts to introduce a newmethodology that can be used to derive information aboutenvironmental quality in its spatial and temporal dimensions.This methodology, based on an inquiry-feedback network of 8,000families and iteration with controlled-feedback of expertcommunity, has been first tested in Shanghai, China andprocedurally can be divided into two steps: Base-year evaluationand forecasting. Fuzzy pattern recognition is introduced for thesubjective assessment of the citizens' feelings theirperceived environment and a four-round Delphi-Cross Impactanalysis is conducted for forecasting the environmental changesup to 2000. Results show that the base-year environmentalsituations were poor. In the foreseeable future, the conditionsfor housing, social services, public health, greenspace anddrinking water will be substantially improved. Due to the rapidgrowth of manufacturing, the city will continue its deteriorating trend of air and water quality into the next century according to the forecast.