Search

In the ongoing context of climate change, there is an increasing need to support decision-making processes in the domain of landscape planning and management. Suitable evaluation techniques are needed to take into account the interests of actors and stakeholders in shared policy decisions. An important methodological contribution to the field is given by the Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), due to its ability to combine multiple aspects of a decision problem with the values and opinions expressed by different Decision Makers. The present paper develops the "Group Analytic Hierarchy Process Sorting II method" (GAHPSort II), which aims to sort a group of municipalities included in the UNESCO site "Vineyard Landscape of Piedmont: Langhe-Roero, and Monferrato" (Italy) according to the economic attractiveness of the landscape. Extending the previous versions AHPSort I, AHPSort II and GAHPSort, the GAHPSort II optimizes multi-stakeholder evaluations on large databases by reducing the number of comparisons. Moreover, the GAHPSort II method is proposed as a novel spatial decision support system because it combines a set of economic indicators for landscape and GIS methods for aiding the Decision Makers to better understand the case study and to support the definition and localization of policies and strategies of landscape planning and management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we deal with an urban and territorial planning problem by applying the Non Additive Robust Ordinal Regression (NAROR). NAROR is a recent extension of the Robust Ordinal Regression family of Multiple Criteria Decision Aiding methods to the Choquet integral preference model which permits to represent interaction between considered criteria through the use of a set of non-additive weights called capacity or fuzzy measure. The use of NAROR permits the Decision Maker (DM) to give preference information in terms of preferences between pairs of alternatives with which she is familiar, and relative importance and interaction of considered criteria. The basic idea of NAROR is to consider the whole set of capacities that are compatible with the preference information given by the DM. In fact, the recommendation supplied by NAROR is expressed in terms of necessary preferences, in case an alternative is preferred to another for all compatible capacities, and of possible preferences, in case an alternative is preferred to another for at least one compatible capacity. In the considered case study, several sites for the location of a landfill are analyzed and compared through the use of the NAROR on the basis of different criteria, such as presence of population, hydrogeological risk, interferences on transport infrastructures and economic cost. This paper is the first application of NAROR to a real-world problem, even if not already with real DMs, but with a panel of experts simulating the decision process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that the incorporation of the intergenerational equity objective has turned the traditional Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) approach into an obsolete tool for the evaluation of certain types of projects, particularly those exhibiting many environmental externalities and those whose effects extend throughout a long period of time. Two main changes are taking place in CBA in order to adapt this methodology to the sustainable development paradigm: (a) the development of new tools for the economic valuation of environmental externalities that were traditionally left out of the analysis; and (b) an in-depth revision of the theoretical foundations underlying the traditional approaches to discounting, since the repercussions of decisions that are presently being debated will extend to a distant future (in some cases for centuries), whereas in the classical CBA, we deal with few decades at best. This paper aims at investigating the discounting operation in CBA, trying to summarize the main approaches available in the literature, with specific reference to the tools which allow future generations to be included in the analysis. In order to support the theoretical explanation, a real case study is analysed concerning the evaluation of a waste incinerator that has been constructed in the Province of Turin (Italy). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]