USING ELECTRE TO RANK OPTIONS WITHIN AN ENVIRONMENTAL APPRAISAL-TWO CASE STUDIES

Since the transposition of the 1985 E.C. Directive on Environmental Impact Assessment into Irish law in 1988, it has been the experience that complex Environmental Impact Statements, produced to help decide the best option from a range of alternatives, often contain large volumes of information on the relevant impacts, but make relatively little effort to organise this information into a decision assisting framework that enables the relative merits of the options to be directly compared.

The paper details the practical application of the ELECTRE decision-aid system to two Environmental Appraisals carried out recently in the Republic of Ireland. The two case studies illustrate how the ELECTR E framework takes complex information from an Environmental Impact Statement and uses it to rank the various project alternatives considered.