Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
S
ij
with mitigation cost-based weights
W
j
deter-
mined using a cost function.
these highly scientific and data-intensive studies
often fail to consider stakeholder concerns in an
approachable manner. Currently, airport authori-
ties essentially assume a media role by focusing
on making information available—information
not easily accessible by the general public due
to the high register of its technical language and
the intimidating length of the impact studies. The
absence of a dialogue means that airport planners
do not receive sufficient feedback to adequately
address the concerns of all interested parties.
While the method presented here is not meant to
compete with the thoroughness of impact studies,
it is nevertheless intended to address the lack of
dialogue inherent in the complexity of such studies.
An innovative application of these theoreti-
cal considerations derives from the observation
that breakthroughs in e-government—the use of
information and communication technologies
to provide and improve public-sector services,
transactions, and interactions—have improved
the service and efficiency of several governmental
organizations throughout the world. Recent find-
ings by McKinsey & Company (Baumgarten &
Chui, 2009) argue that e-government applications
along with adequate management structures have
the potential to encourage participation from the
general public in policy making. The advantage
of leveraging such public attention is that this
process may, in the end, give more legitimacy
to policy decisions. Web 2.0 technologies, such
as blogs, wikis, and mash-ups allowing users to
participate in discussions and combine data from
multiple sources, may thus facilitate a shift in the
mind-set of airport planning authorities from a
“publishing” frame of mind to a “sharing” one
that embraces more user participation.
Taking a similar approach, one can foresee
the application of this evaluation method in the
construction of an e-governance tool: an “Air-
port Environmental Dashboard”. Promoted by
airport authorities and documented by planners
and designers, the dashboard would be an online
j
j
∑
1
∑
1
UP
=
U W
⋅
CP
=
S W
⋅
i
ij
j
i
ij
j
j
=
j
=
Two rankings of alternatives emerge from these
performance values—one that is utility-based
and one that is mitigation-cost based. End-users
can consider these two rankings independently to
analyze the specific performance of each alterna-
tive for the two groups of criteria. Otherwise, they
may combine rankings in a weighted sum or by
simply adding them.
Both cost and utility-based procedures produce
two separate rankings of alternatives. End-users
have the choice to consider these rankings sepa-
rately for discussing their final decision or combine
them into an overall score, with or without weights
that best reflect their concerns. Combining rank-
ings instead of actual scores overcomes the issue
of heterogeneous units—cost functions produce
scores in monetary units while utility functions
use dimensionless quantities. In our opinion, the
combination of mitigation cost functions and
utility functions with separate rankings brings
a higher level of objectivity compared to other
methods while at the same time remaining reason-
ably simple enough to incorporate stakeholders'
input and implement in a real-life situation. It is
clear that the definition of utility and cost func-
tions will be the matter of much debate among
experts and stakeholders. End-users will do well
to acknowledge this challenge and understand
that in the first implementation steps, qualitative
procedures will be favored.
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS
Current regulatory environmental impact assess-
ments analyze in significant depth the breath of en-
vironmental issues incurred by a project. However,
