An approach to determine the quality of EIA reports of hydropower plants using analytic network process and fuzzy logic toolbox

Abstract

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is a precautionary and interlinked environmental regulation tool utilized by relevant authorities. Presently, there is no singular global set of EIA quality criteria to review the performances of the EIA reports on hydropower plants. In this paper, a new approach has been undertaken to create a well-organized objective type framework for a simple, fast, and comprehensive evaluation of the quality of a subjective type EIA report on a hydropower plant. In authors' previous research, for a quantitative performance evaluation of EIA reports, Fuzzy Logic Toolbox was used where nine attributes of an EIA report were selected as inputs, and the method was found to be effective. In this research, a detailed description of the rules for selecting the quality parameters for the attributes with different criteria are described with the objective type framework. With the help of Analytic Network Process (ANP), the importance score of each of the nine interrelated attributes is calculated, and these importance scores are used as the limits for the attributes (inputs) in Fuzzy Logic Toolbox. Considering the quality criteria and using “If-Then” expert rules, the final qualities of the attributes from a hydropower plant EIA report are determined, and by putting the final qualities of the attributes in the Fuzzy Logic Toolbox, a final score indicating the overall quality of the report is obtained. The novel objective type framework and Fuzzy Logic Toolbox together can assist in reviewing the quality of a subjective EIA report in a faster, more comprehensive, and quantitative way.