Prioritizing community environmental concerns with a hybrid approach to multi-criteria decision-making – a case study of Newport News, Virginia, USA

Abstract

Local communities can play a very important role in evaluating their environmental conditions and in developing innovative, practical, and effective solutions to improve community environmental health. Thus, community involvement in decision-making is one of the keys to improving environmental and public health. However, such a process is unquestionably complicated and demands well-organized collaboration between local communities and authoritative partners, as well as suitable decision-aiding methods/tools that facilitate a multiple-step decision process, starting from the identification and prioritization of hazards, risks and concerns, to the development and ranking of potential solutions. We introduce a new multi-criteria decision-making method named BESTMAP (Bounding, Eliciting, and Sliding Technique for Multi-Criterion Analysis of Priorities). BESTMAP inherits the strengths of several popular MCDM models and retains their respective merits by tackling myriad concerns with a practical, yet rigorous, approach to derive preference. BESTMAP has been developed in a familiar (offline) web-browser interface to facilitate stakeholder use. Integrating practicality and methodological rigor, BESTMAP serves as an effective model for MCDM applications, especially those with a large number of criteria and alternatives in general, and for prioritizing concerns for community environmental health in particular, where the list of concerns is often numerous, unclear, and diverse between different stakeholders.