Developing practices for supporting EIA with MCDA

Abstract

Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) is a systematic and transparent approach for supporting the analysis of multiple alternatives in complex problems involving multiple criteria. MCDA provides great potential for supporting Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) processes including a structured framework for evaluating different alternatives and a way to combine stakeholders’ subjective views about the criteria with objective measurement data about the alternatives. However, our earlier experiences suggest that the quality and effectiveness of MCDA depend very much on how well MCDA is integrated into the process and how interactive the use of supporting MCDA tool is. In this presentation, we discuss the application opportunities of the principles and tools of MCDA in EIA and identify good practices for applying MCDA to support EIA processes. We present a framework for computer-aided MCDA based stakeholder participation that aims to increase the quality of the EIA process without still being too laborious to carry out. This study is a part of the IMPERIA project funded by EU’s Life programme, in which one objective is to develop software tools for the practitioners. In software development, one challenge is that the responsible use of MCDA methods and tools require good knowledge of MCDA theory. However, we think that the specificity of EIA as an application area makes it possible to develop easy-to-use tools with such guidance that also EIA practitioners not familiar with MCDA are able to use the software. We also discuss what kind of process support is required from this kind of a tool.