The presence of qualitative information in environmental policy analysis is a rule, rather than an exception. This book is mainly concerned with the issue of fuzzy information in multicriteria evaluation. New analytical tools able to tackle economy-environment interactions and operationalize equity issues are presented. The behaviour of such mathematical procedures is shown by means of real world environmental management problems. Moreover, the consistency between the methodology of multicriteria evaluation and the epistemological foundations of ecological economics is investigated in depth.

This book is the result of some years of research carried out at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam and at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. The awareness of actual and potential conflicts between economic progress in production, consumption, and technology and the environment has led to the concept of "sustainable development", implying that economic and ecological values are well balanced in evaluation and decision making. The linkages between ecosystems and economic systems are the focus of ecological economics. In ecological economics, a multidimensional approach to economic and policy-making is emphasised. In this book, the introduction of multicriteria decision aid techniques in the framework of ecological economics is widely discussed. Since such techniques are based on a "constructive" rationality and allow one to take into account conflictual, multidimensional, incommensurable and uncertain effects of decisions, they can be considered perfectly consistent with the methodological foundations of ecological economics. Since here the assumption is accepted that efficiency, equity and sustainability are the three conflictual values of economics, a mathematical procedure able to deal with these issues in an operational framework is developed, with a particular view on imprecise information in a practical environmental planning context. Given the problem of the differences in the measurement levels of the variables used for economic-ecological modelling, multicriteria methods able to deal with mixed information (both qualitative and quantitative measurements) can be considered particularly useful. Another problem related to the available information concerns the uncertainty (stochastic and/or fuzzy) contained in this information.

Inhalt
1 Environmental Issues and Evaluation Methods.- 1.1 Environmental Problems.- 1.2 Scope and Aim of this Study.- 1.3 Multicriteria Evaluation in Environmental Management.- 1.4 Qualitative Information in Environmental Evaluation Models.- 1.5 Structure of the Book.- Measurement Scales.- A Theoretical Analysis of Cost-Benefit Analysis and Multicriteria Evaluation.- 2 from Environmental Economics to Ecological Economics.- 3 Cost-Benefit Analysis.- 4 Multiple Criteria Evaluation Methods.- B Multicriteria Evaluation in a Fuzzy Environment.- 5 Fuzzy Uncertainty in Decision Models.- 6 Comparison of Fuzzy Sets: a New Semantic Distance.- 7 Multicriteria Evaluation in a Fuzzy environment: the Naïade Method.- 8 A Fuzzy Cluster Procedure for Environmental Conflict Analysis.- 9 Sensitivity Analysis in the NAIADE Method.- C Application to A Real-World Environmental Management Problem.- 10 the River Po Basin Environmental Policy. Background Information and Analytical Framework.- 11 the Po Delta Natural Park: the Boscone Della Mesola Environmental Management Problem.- 12 Conclusions: Retrospect and Prospect.- References and Bibliography.