Risk management of chemicals and contaminated land – from planning to verification - Environmental Deterioration and Contamination: Problems and their Management - page 287

- CBA is based on the approach of welfare economics, which does not adapt har-

monically to sustainability and eco-efficiency and does not rank the environment
at the same level with human well-being;

- Not all costs are monetizable and summarizable. To be able to weight and

aggregate all impacts, one should apply MCA.

6.2 Multi-criteria analysis (MCA)
MCA is a decision-making tool suitable for solving complex problems. In a situation
where multiple criteria are involved with impacts of different types and scales, a well-
structured decision-making process should be created and applied, otherwise confusion
may arise due to partial and disproportional judgments. Another advantage of MCA is
that it is not necessary to achieve a consensus in a multidisciplinary team of evaluators
and decision makers. They do not have to agree on the criteria and their scaling, and
on the rankings of the alternatives. Each member contributes with an equal judgment
to the jointly reached conclusion.
MCA is the qualitative or semiquantitative assessment and evaluation of the direct
and indirect environmental, economic, social and cultural costs and benefits using
mathematical statistical methods to approximate the final result of the assessment by
aggregation of all estimated impacts. MCA is a comparative tool, able to take into
account several points of view which may be subjective or even contradictory. It is use-
ful to synthesize the opinions expressed in order to determine the priority structures, to
analyze conflicting situations or to formulate recommendations or operational advice
(EC MCA, 2013).
MCA is a decision-support tool for the comparative assessment of alternative man-
agement options using and aggregating several evaluation criteria of different units of
measurement. MCA can be integrated into prospective and retrospective evaluation
systems within ERM. MCA is a team work needing the involvement of all stakeholders
and decision makers. The result of MCA is used for management option selection, for
supporting environmental management tasks to identify the best management practice
and environmental technologies resulting in the most efficient allocation of budgets.
Its result is not a monetary value unlike CBA. MCA can also integrate other criteria
than costs and benefits without converting them into costs or benefits. MCA evalu-
ates the options in terms of scoring and/or weighting. The criteria and the weights
are established and agreed by the MCA team consisting of all stakeholders. Another
version of MCA is the multi-criteria/multi-judge system where every participant may
create his or her own criteria and weights.
MCA can also be useful for the retrospective evaluation of the implemented
management option. MCA's implementation phases are:

- Specifying the management task or actions to be judged : this requires the inventory

of the options to be compared. The question to answer by MCA should be properly
specified in this phase;

- Specifying evaluation criteria : the criteria should reflect the complexity of the

management task and the preferences of the decision makers. All possible crite-
ria should be inventoried and included resulting in an exhaustive list of criteria.
The selected measures to be compared should correspond to the evaluation criteria,