Environmental Protection Solutions by Multicriteria Decision Making

摘要

The increasing public concern about environmental quality forces the development of evaluation models and the implementation of improvement strategies. Air, water and land pollution, and particularly waste management, are considered in this paper as the issues related to environmental protection. The decision making methodology for sustainable environmental management should include estimation of cumulative, interactive effects over time caused by current and foreseeable actions, and searching for a balance of the ecological, social and economic dimensions. The main aim is to capture all relevant foreseeable impacts in their most appropriate and representative units. Practical decision problems are often characterized by several noncommensurable and competing (conflicting) criteria, with no solution satisfying all criteria simultaneously. The multicriteria decision making method VIKOR could be applied for ranking alternatives and selecting compromise solution from the set of alternatives. Indicators of sustainable environmental protection should be identified constructing a hierarchy with the following main criteria: economy (costs and benefits), protection of natural environment, social acceptability, and institutional. Multicriteria decision making for municipal solid waste management in the region of Novi Sad, Serbia is presented as an illustrating example.