Investigation on the Application of Ecological Compensation to Highway Construction

Abstract

This study has modified the evaluation framework and its assessment score table that were used earlier to apply ecological compensation to study the environmental impact of transportation infrastructure construction. The previous evaluation framework which has four major issues with a total of 16 factors was established by the Fuzzy Delphi method (FDM) and the weighted value for each factor in its ecological compensation assessment table were determined by using the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchical process (FAHP). However, the evaluation framework was formulated to work with all types of transportation infrastructure. After having studied quite a few highway construction projects, it was found that some of the factors may not be suitable to study the environmental impact on highway construction projects. This study has proposed a new framework for highway construction with four issues and 12 factors. The new assessment score table is still obtained by using FAHP. However, the three compensation mechanisms, “Avoidance”, “Mitigation” and “Compensation” and the criteria to determine the proper ecological compensation mechanism are still used. Finally, the ecological compensation of a highway construction project has been studied by using the proposed framework to show that it can be used in future highway infrastructure construction ecological compensation study.