Participatory and multiobjective development of watercourse regulation—creation of regulation alternatives from stakeholders' preferences

Abstract

Summary: Multicriteria decision analysis methods have been recently applied in many multifaceted and complex environmental problems. Major aims have been to structure and to analyse the complex problems, to compare incommensurable impacts and to clarify the preference order of alternatives. Most of the MCDM tools concentrate on describing the choice among the alternatives. The choice often occurs at the end of the decision-making process, but the process can be assisted with MCDM tools also earlier. The regulation development project of the Pirkanmaa region was a very complex one. There are four large regulated lakes which are connected to each other and a large constructed river downstream. The goal of the lake regulation development project of Pirkanmaa was to create new more sustainable regulation strategies for these lakes. The aim of this study was to clarify the objectives of various stakeholders and to analyse how the differences in their opinions affect target water levels. To structure the regulation development problem a new value-tree based Excel spreadsheet model (REGAIM) was developed. In the model the ecological, social and economic impacts of water levels fluctuation were combined with subjective preferences related to the importance of various impacts. The goal was to support generation of a regulation practice which would satisfy the objectives of the respondent. All in all 36 face to face computer aided interviews with the REGAIM model were undertaken. In this article we present how decision analysis interviews were applied in the first phase of the project. We also analyse the general applicability of this approach to regulation development projects.