Sustainability And Environmental Decision Making

This book examines scientific tools methods, and approaches for incorporating sustainability concepts into assessments used to support Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) decision making.

The experience developed by Ian McHarg represents the first attempt to base environmental planning on more objective methods. In particular, he supposed that the real world can be considered as a layer cake and each layer represents a sectoral analysis. This metaphor represents the fundamental of overlay mapping.

Increasingly, environmental decision making is like playing a multidimensional game of chess. With interactions between the atmosphere, the litho-hydrosphere, and the biosphere, the game is at once a measure of complexity, uncertainty, interdisciplinary acuity, social-environmental sustainability, and social justice for all generations.

Decision-making in real-world problems, including individual process decisions, requires an appropriate and reliable decision support system. Fuzzy set theory, rough set theory, and neutrosophic set theory, which are MCDM techniques, are useful for modeling complex decision-making problems with imprecise, ambiguous, or vague data.