Applying Multiple Criteria Aid for Decision to Environmental Management

Description

There is a demand for aids to decision making from different scientific disciplines in the assessment and management of environmental problems. Since such problems cannot be solved on the basis of one criterion of choice, i.e. by the optimization of a single criterion, multicriteria decision aids (MCDA) have to be used. There is a variety of MCDA methods, each having been developed for a specific domain of application. Here it is shown that many methods can be used in the environmental management problem. The book is divided into three sections. Section 1 is concerned with MCDA in environmental managements, and is subdivided into sections covering general aspects, environmental planning, waste management, and energy management. Section 2 contains three papers: Environment, social choices and intergenerational equity; Indicators for sustainable agriculture and rural development, and tools for analysis; and An ecosystem and its equilibrium points. Section 3 contains contributions on various specific MCDA methods, such as neural nets, ARGUS, AHP, SURMESURE, morphological theories, and rough-set sorting.