Environmental and resource planning: Methodologies to support the decision making process

This chapter illustrates two types of evaluation techniques for environmental and resource planning: economic valuations and multicriteria analysis. A general scheme for the evaluation is first introduced as a reference for the techniques described in the chapter: Benefit-Cost Analysis (BCA), Cost-Effectiveness Analysis (CEA) and Multicriteria Analysis (MCA). These techniques are among the most applied in environmental and resource planning. The chapter first describes BCA and CEA within a general framework of welfare economics and efficient allocation of resources. It then describes the main features of the methods and the most frequently used techniques to associate monetary values to environmental resources. The usefulness, applicability and limits of these techniques are discussed. Multicriteria analysis is then introduced as a representative of a class of methods that do not require monetary valuations. The chapter focuses on a particular MCA technique, value functions, and describes the main features of the methodology and the differences compared to BCA and CEA. Instead of describing the technicalities of value functions, the chapter focus is on the most critical application issues, which determine the added value of MCA in practice.