Chapter 16 - Environmental impacts mitigation odds by soft-computing methods

Abstract

Diverse economic activities, independently if they are industrial, agricultural, commercial, or touristic ones, have as the first objective to support increasing humanity’s quality of life. Beside the direct desired positive impacts of economic activities there are usually also negative, undesired, sometimes unthinkable impacts on the environment and society. Nowadays several global challenges are facing humanity, first collected and debated half of century before by the Club of Rome under the concept of “World Problematique.” As a result of several debates with regard to finding proper solutions to created situations, the concept of sustainable development has emerged, defined for the first time in 1987 in the Brundtland Report. Finding optimum ways for its concrete application means a careful analysis and assessment of the chances and challenges of developing and using technological applications. To carry out a comprehensive environmental impact assessment of industrial activities, a general and flexible methodology by a systemic approach is necessary to be developed, which has to take into account specific frameworks of each observed system. In this context, an important role is played by environmental indicators, which should support decision-making processes for getting best environmental impacts mitigation odds. In the process of developing environmental indicators applying soft-computing methods has been analyzed, especially fuzzy logic-based aggregation methods. An indicator for air pollution, air pollution index, based on fuzzy logic, will be presented and applied for different regions. Got results will be discussed and conclusions regarding using odds of presented methodology will be drawn.