Abstract
Cities are facing increasing pressures to enact adaptation measures due to climate change. While blue-green infrastructure has emerged as a focal adaptation technique for stormwater management, in order to craft adaptation policies cities must consider a multitude of emerging, complex, and competing stakeholder interests around multiple adaptation alternatives. However, accounting for these different interests, analyzing their diverse priorities, and maintaining a transparent decision-making process is not easily achieved within the existing policy frameworks. Here we define and present a combined multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) methods that easily integrates and quantifies stakeholder priorities while remaining accessible for non-experts engaged in the policy-making process. We demonstrate the method’s effectiveness through analyzing opinions about stormwater adaptation in New York City across several stakeholder groups. The method succeeds in integrating quantitative and qualitative judgements, indicating stakeholder preferential differences and allowing for more inclusive policy to be crafted. It can be extended beyond stormwater to many urban climate adaptation decisions facing multi-criteria considerations.
Highlights
Climate change is placing enormous pressures on urban policy decision-making.Traditional governance decision-making methods are being re-evaluated with the growing importance of urban sustainability, resilience, and adaptation
As the number of criteria needed in urban policy and climate change decisions becomes complex, the criteria weights are utilized in TOPSIS to test the performance of the alternatives, reducing the number of judgements required by the decision-maker and the computational complexity of the multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA)
To allow the geometric mean method (GM) to be directly comparable with these existing studies, we propose using the geometric consistency index (GCI) interpreted by Aguaron and Moreno-Jimenez [67] from Crawford and Williams [56] (Equation (3))
Summary
Climate change is placing enormous pressures on urban policy decision-making. Traditional governance decision-making methods are being re-evaluated with the growing importance of urban sustainability, resilience, and adaptation. Our study aims to demonstrate that a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), based on a combined analytic hierarchy process (AHP)- technique for order preferences by similarity to ideal solutions (TOPSIS) method, can contribute to increased stakeholder involvement and satisfaction with urban stormwater adaptation policy. While these methods have been utilized in stormwater management before, they are usually presented with a level of expertise that prevents non-experts from immediately engaging with the methodology. This paper forms Part I of a two-part study on urban pluvial flood management
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