Analysis of the relevance of the location of quarrying surfaces by using a multi-criteria decision support tool taking into account the sustainable territorial development (Case of Settat – Morocco)

Abstract

The cohabitation between the material extraction activity and its receiving environment requires a conciliation between the three dimensions of sustainable development, namely the economic, social and environmental aspects. Given that the reasons for the existence of this extractive industry are economic, it feeds the pillar sectors of the economy (civil engineering, buildings ...) or, social it creates employment and contributes significantly to the revenue of local communities through taxes but it has disadvantages on the receiving ecosystem. The problem is to know how to make this sector a vector of economic development without compromising the environment in order to guarantee and ensure simultaneously economic growth and social equity and environmental protection and to make the territory more attractive and sustainable to investments in this field. Therefore, it has become necessary to take into account these three pillars when locating this activity. The said location is an essential decision, the fact of favoring one of the three aspects over the other aspects will undoubtedly have consequences on the environment where the activity is hosted (either more positive or more negative, conditioned by its choice). Indeed, the choice of quarry sites is a multi-criteria issue since we must reconcile the three imperatives of sustainable development which are often contradictory. In this sense this work has opted for a decision-making approach designed from a decision-making tool process of hierarchical analysis (AHP), said approach is based on the three axes of sustainable development (economic, social and environmental) which are subdivided into 16 criteria and apply on options (15 careers). The choice of criteria families, criteria and options was made while respecting the imperatives of sustainable development and according to their distributions and typologies at the level of the study area. Once these decision elements were identified, the attractiveness of the options on each criterion was evaluated, weighted according to the concerns and preferences presented by the decisionmakers and then aggregated by the AHP method in order to produce a hierarchy of the criteria and options. The implementation of this method allows for the evaluation of existing quarry operations in the study area and the forecasting of future optimization of quarry facilities