Assessment of ecological environment impact in highway construction activities with improved group AHP-FCE approach in China

Highway construction is time consuming and complicated. Various environmental issues can be encountered during this process. Therefore, it is necessary to assess the impact of ecologic environment in highway construction. However, the traditional assessment approaches paid more attention to the environmental factors rather than the ecological problems, and the weights of evaluation indexes were assigned with relatively average values, which cannot comprehensively and accurately to assess the impact of ecological environment in highway construction. In order to solve these problems, this paper established a new model to combine improved group AHP and FCE. A total of six main factors and 22 sub-factors from three aspects of social, ecological, and natural environment were identified. The model and index system were applied to the ecological environment impact assessment of the highway from the city of Hanzhong to Lueyang County section in Shaanxi Province, and compared with traditional fuzzy AHP approach to verify the feasibility of this model. The results showed that only the ranking of social and ecological factor changed when comparing with the traditional approach. The weight of social factor determined by the improved approach was 0.2835, while that of the traditional approach was only 0.2365, and the weight difference was 0.047. This improved approach highlighted the importance of social factor and overcame the equal weight distribution of traditional approach, which made the overall weight ratio distribution more reasonable and objective. The comprehensive assessment result was 0.3482, which was in line with the “general impact” level. This was consistent with the actual situation of highway construction. The improved group AHP-FCE model could be used successfully for assessing the impact of the ecological environment in highway construction, and it had good applicability and popularization value in ecological environment assessment.