Incorporating Uncertainty and Decision Analysis into a Water-Sustainability Index
Publication: Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 141, Issue 12
Abstract
This paper describes the development and testing of a methodology to assess water vulnerability and stress called “Water Sustainability through Decision Analysis.” This method uses multicriteria decision analysis to measure water sustainability through a multidisciplinary lense and includes measures of water availability, demand, and policy. Assessing water sustainability is ultimately a decision problem that involves multiple stakeholders and perspectives. Uncertainty is an important and often-overlooked aspect of water sustainability. To fill this critical knowledge gap, the water sustainability through decision analysis method accounts for the uncertainty in the input data and unknown decision-maker preferences using stochastic multicriteria decision analysis. Addressing the problem of uncertainty helps to calculate risk and bypasses the problem of unknown decision maker preferences without resorting to equal or arbitrary weights for measures of sustainability. The method is applied to eight states in the southeastern United States. Georgia ranked high in water sustainability and Texas ranked low. The results provide a single outranking index and also highlight actionable items that can improve each state’s water sustainability.
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Acknowledgments
The researchers would like to thank the Mississippi Energy Institute for funding this project. This material is also based upon work supported by Mississippi State University and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture, under Project No. 160000-010-300-02700.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 141 • Issue 12 • December 2015
Copyright
© 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jan 26, 2015
Accepted: Apr 13, 2015
Published online: Jun 2, 2015
Discussion open until: Nov 2, 2015
Published in print: Dec 1, 2015
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