Environmental Impact Assessment of Water Resources Development Projects Using the Electre_TRI Model (A Case Study of Ardebil Reservoir, Drainage, and Irrigation Network)

Large-scale water resource development projects have been in many cases known to have a multitude of complex environmental impacts. The proper assessment of these impacts not only requires novel approaches to deal with the multiple aspects of these impacts but also needs rather quantitative techniques to make more reliable and less uncertain synthesis of the overall consequences of the project activities on both the integrity and health of the surrounding environment. Analysis of the significance of the environmental impacts is a multi-criteria decision making problem and makes the core of the conventional environmental impact assessment methods. However, these conventional measures of significance analyses are proved to be inadequate for dealing with the imprecise, vague, and uncertain nature of the linguistic assessments of the ecological, social, and cultural impacts. A new numerical method called the fuzzy outranking sorting technique for ELECTRE TRI (ELimination Et Choix Traduisant la REalite) is proposed and applied in this research for the purpose of environmental impact significance assessment of the Ardebil Reservoir, Drainage and Irrigation Development Project in Northwestern Iran. The basic idea behind the research was to develop a methodological framework to assist the environmental impact analysts in reducing, as much as possible, the intrinsic imprecise and uncertain traits of the multi-expert judgment based methods currently used in the analysis of environmental impacts of theCompared to the compensatory MCDM techniques, ELECTRE TRI provides the advantage of using a fuzzy approach in the analysis of the vague and poorly determined set of judgment data and helps in more credible assignment of values to a set of predefined categories with respect to a set of impact criteria. Results of the Fuzzy ELECTRE TRI based analyses are compared with the weighted sum method, which is one of the current methods in environmental impact assessment process. It is argued that due to its multiple criteria and fuzzy characteristics, the ELECTRE TRI method is capable of producing more reliable inputs for the decision making process compared to the conventional additive techniques.