delphi technique

Drought is one of the natural phenomenons which have the most damages to the arid and semi-arid areas. Today the catchment of Uromieh Lake with large scale of population density is one of the most important environmental challenges, so that, because of low precipitation and decrease of water flows in recent years, the life of this lake has been in serious hazard. This catchment with 52000 square kilometers, and average of 200 to 900 millimeters of rainfall, has the water volumes of 22 billion cubic meters of water in all its catchment. There has been constructed several dams with reserving volume of 3 billion cubic meters on the rivers coming to the lake, in order to providing the needs of agriculture and human fresh water. Regarding the diminish of catchment area of the lake and the amount of water flow, prefect restoration of the lake is very rare.
In this research, we have tried to explain the impact of the factors of the crises with recognizing the causes of outbreak of crises by using Delphi technique, in order to accession of managing priorities.
In this research, four main criteria and 21 sub-criteria have been identified the causes of crisis in the lake of Uromieh.
Discussion and According to the findings of this research, there are four main criteria and 21 sub-criteria. Construction of dams with 23 percent and changes in cropping patterns with 8 percent of impact, are the most important and effective causes of crises in the lake of Uromieh.

Sustainable development with emphasis on environmental sustainability addresses the interaction between humans and the environment. In this study, it has been attempted to investigate and realize a clear understanding of the principles that affect the issue of sustainability in environmental design. The collected data were analyzed through the content analysis. Following the identification of the criteria, the Delphi study was set up to identify which of them were most important and to derive the priority weightings for each. This study comprised two questionnaire rounds that were sent to two different sets of panel members. 45 invitations were sent out. The experts were selected from the people with substantial knowledge in the field of planning and design. They were from the pool of academics and practitioners involved in environmental design, landscape architecture and urban design. 31 experts agreed to participate and completed the first and second rounds, while 16 architects and 15 landscape architects participated in both rounds, meeting the target. “Importance” indicates whether such attributes were deemed important by the expert; “suitability” indicates whether such attributes, while important, were suitable tools to evaluate the sustainability in environmental design. This study represents the results of the ranking and weighting of the factors by the experts according to a set of factors. The results of ANOVA showed statistically significant differences among the architects and landscape architects and their opinions about several factors.

Concerns about the inadequacy of environmental quality exist in most cities of Iran. Environmental problems represent one of the most important issues in modern urban areas, alongside their conflicts with the natural environment. The urban environment comprises the three sub-systems of natural environment, socio-economic environment, and human structure. Moreover, quality of life in cities is one of the main elements in urban development. As a consequence, Urban Environment Quality Assessment has been of great importance in urban development planning. Generally, quality of life is an important criterion for meeting the needs of urban citizens and for enabling social and economic services for them as well as ensuring access to such urban amenities as hospitals, parks, etc. This research study aimed to identify and rank the environmental indicators in Kermanshah city though use of a questionnaire, the Delphi technique and factor analysis. This research was descriptive-analytical in terms of its character and objectives, and fro the perspective of data and information collection in a documentary and survey manner. The statistical population of the study comprised environmental experts identifies according to their environmental conditions and the indicators were extracted using the Delphi technique, as a knowledge-gathering method, and questionnaires. The members of the Delphi panel comprised between 10-15 people distributed over two or three rounds based on the agreement of the members of the questionnaire group. With the consent of the members of the Delphi panel, three rounds of questionnaires were distributed and, in each round, some of the indices were eliminated from the total of the questions and the factors that scored highest in each round were selected for the next one. In order to evaluate and analyse the questionnaire data and determine the main factors, a factor analysis method was used in SPSS software. Factor analysis is a method for reducing a large number of quantitative variables into a small number of underlying assumed variables, known as agents, and its main purpose is to reduce the volume of data and to determine the most important variables in the formation of a particular phenomenon. According to the results of the analysis of questionnaires in three rounds of 51 primary indicators extracted from internationally accredited institutions and indices of Iran, and the localization of these indicators for Kermanshah, 15 indicators were selected as final indicators. After analysing the data using the factor analysis method in SPSS software, the results showed that among the 15 final factors, the six following factors relating to air pollution monitoring station density, wastewater treatment, natural disasters, ratio of durable buildings to total buildings, the volume of produced waste, and the density of green spaces were of a high magnitude of one and were selected as the main factors that gave a total of 82.336 variance among the community. The factor of air pollution monitoring station density was allocated as the first factor with the highest variance at 31.046. Thus, it can be concluded that the determination of indicators for assessing the quality of urban environmental conditions is considered as the most important and is the first step in determining the quality of any given urban environment. In addition to studying and studying the urban environment of Kermanshah, this research provides an appropriate basis for developing strategies for urban sustainability with environmental attitudes in order for environmental conditions of Kermanshah to evolve. Of the six final factors, there are four physical-chemical factors that indicate the high sensitivity of this environment and the need for high level officials to increase the quality of this urban environment.

Power plants, due to the nature of their processes and activities and also by producing the effluents, emitting the air pollutants and hazardous wastes, have the potential to cause negative human and environmental consequences. Given the importance of the issue, for determining the most important consequences of Abadan Gas Power Plant and also their impact on the human and natural environment, as a case study, a questionnaire was developed with Delphi method. This questionnaire was distributed within the environmentalists and experts of power plant. The human and environmental consequences of Power Plant were analyzed by Multiple Criteria Decision-Making methods including AHP and eigenvector technique. For this purpose, with applying of AHP method, the hierarchical structure of the human and environmental consequences of Abadan Gas Power Plant was constructed and then the decision making matrix was formed. The pair wise matrices were formed separately for criteria pair wise comparisons with respect to severity and occurrence probability of indoor and outdoor environment of power plant .With entering the data in EXPERT CHOICE software, criteria weights were computed with applying the eigenvector method. Then the final weights of consequences in terms of severity and occurrence probability of risk were computed. The results from the compution of Abadan Gas Power Plant consequences indicate that in human consequences, shallow wounds with a .105 weight and in environmental consequences, air pollution by weighing 0.66 are the most important consequences of power plant. Finally, the most important executable strategies and actions for mitigation of negative human and environmental consequences were presented.