Application of environmental risk assessment for strategic decision-making in coastal areas: case studies in China

An Approach and Methodology of Environmental Risk Assessment for Strategic Decision-Making

“…It is worth mentioning that this case study also adopted an MCDA approach, combined with Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) model and expert judgment, which is a commonly used methodology for sectoral decision-making (Satty, 1996;Khadam and Kaluarachichi, 2003;Linkov et al, 2006;Chen et al, 2011;Topuz et al, 2011), as a comparative study with [I, C; R] model in the Step II of PCFZ (Wu, 2012). The results by this MCDA approach showed that the decisionmaking values of environmental risks for alternatives of Tourism and Shipping were ¡5.35 and ¡6.66, respectively.…”

“…The risk matrix model was used to characterize the regional comprehensive risk. The final results integrated the results of predicted assessment, the judgment criteria (Zhu et al, 2003;USNRC, 2008) of probability (P)/frequency (F) of occurrence, severity of incident (C), and the results of expert judgment and public involvement in Xiamen Bay (Wu, 2012).…”

“…dose-response and exposure model, Bayesian model, fault-event tree, fuzzy mathematic model, etc.) need special data to develop risk analysis for special objectives, which is difficult to achieve in SDM processes due to a usual lack of data and the high uncertainty involved (Wu, 2012); (ii) many techniques of decision analysis (e.g. BCA, MCDA, etc.)…”

“…Furthermore, the methods of MCDA are relatively complicated and subjective in their process of the criteria selection and weight distribution for the preference of decision-makers (Linkov et al, 2006); (iii) SDM can be viewed as a special kind of decision-making under regionality, integrality and uncertainty (Schwenk, 1995), and is much higher than project or sectoral decision-making level (Yin, 2010). All EIAs (including ERAs) for project or sectoral decision-making are passive-active processes because their analyses are generally made after the conclusion of the SDM processes, which makes the predictability of environmental consequences weaker at strategic levels compared with the project or sectoral decision-making level (Nilsson and Dalkmann, 2001); and (iv) there is no systemic study and application of the approaches and methods of ERA for SDM process so far (Wu, 2012).…”

“…Moreover, current ERAs find it hard to adequately predict and assess the cumulative risk impacts of SDM (Wu, 2012).…”