Showing papers by "Gregory A. Kiker published in 2005"

Application of Multicriteria Decision Analysis in Environmental Decision Making

Abstract: Decision making in environmental projects can be complex and seemingly intractable, principally because of the inherent trade-offs between sociopolitical, environmental, ecological, and economic factors. The selection of appropriate remedial and abatement strategies for contaminated sites, land use planning, and regulatory processes often involves multiple additional criteria such as the distribution of costs and benefits, environmental impacts for different populations, safety, ecological risk, or human values. Some of these criteria cannot be easily condensed into a monetary value, partly because environmental concerns often involve ethical and moral principles that may not be related to any economic use or value. Furthermore, even if it were possible to aggregate multiple criteria rankings into a common unit, this approach would not always be desirable because the ability to track conflicting stakeholder preferences may be lost in the process. Consequently, selecting from among many different alternatives often involves making trade-offs that fail to satisfy 1 or more stakeholder groups. Nevertheless, considerable research in the area of multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) has made available practical methods for applying scientific decision theoretical approaches to complex multicriteria problems. This paper presents a review of the available literature and provides recommendations for applying MCDA techniques in environmental projects. A generalized framework for decision analysis is proposed to highlight the fundamental ingredients for more structured and tractable environmental decision making.

Multi-criteria decision analysis: a framework for managing contaminated sediments

Abstract: Decision-making in environmental projects can be complex and seemingly intractable, principally due to the inherent existence of tradeoffs between sociopolitical, environmental, and economic factors. One tool that has been used to support environmental decision-making is comparative risk assessment (CRA). Central to CRA is the construction of a two-dimensional decision matrix that contains project alternatives' scores on various criteria. The projects are then evaluated by either qualitatively comparing the projects' scores on the different criteria or by somehow quantitatively aggregating the criterion scores for each project and comparing the aggregate scores. Although CRA is laudable in its attempts to evaluate projects using multiple criteria, it has at least one significant drawback. That drawback is the unclear or unsupported way in which it combines performance on criteria to arrive at an optimal project alternative. In the case of qualitative comparison of project scores using CRA, it can be unclear why an alternative is chosen if it performs better only on some criteria compared to another alternative. Quantitative CRAs are often unsupported in how they determine the relative importance of each criterion in determining an aggregate score for each alternative.

Towards Using Comparative Risk Assessment to Manage Contaminated Sediments

Abstract: Comparative risk assessment (CRA) has been used as an environmental decision making tool at a range of regulatory levels in the past two decades. Contaminated and uncontaminated sediments are currently managed using a range of approaches and technologies; however, a method for conducting a comprehensive, multidimensional assessment of the risks, costs and benefits associated with each option has yet to be developed. The development and application of CRA to sediment management problems will provide for a more comprehensive characterization and analysis of the risks posed by potential management alternatives. The need for a formal CRA framework and the potential benefits and key elements of such a framework are discussed.