No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

The decision-making process for the selection of Best Management Practice (BMP) systems for stormwater runoff management involves a variety of stakeholders within public and private sectors holding differing powers and opinions regarding the significance they attribute to differing criteria. The paper describes a web-based multi-criteria analysis (MCA) approach being developed within the EU 5th Framework DayWater project (www.daywater.org) to support stakeholder negotiation and the development of mutually acceptable sustainable solutions to the problem of control and treatment of urban surface water drainage. The MCA matrix methodology is outlined and some of the advantages and limitations of the procedure and its application are discussed.

Despite the great importance of sustainable development for a country, it is possible to say, having reviewed the literature widely, that this research is the first to use a Multi-Criteria Decision Method (MCDM) to analyze the sustainability of EU countries, considering different dimensions and weighting the criteria with the help of a group of experts. This paper therefore sets out a Multi-Criteria Model for analyzing the development of sustainability in EU countries (and Norway and Iceland). This required prior filtering and analysis of the data from the Eurostat database. The model was built with the multi-criteria Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique. Four experts in sustainability participated in the weighting process. The results of the AHP model are identified by areas of sustainability, with the highest value found in Norway, and the rest are found around it forming rings of sustainability, where sustainability decreases the further a country is from Norway. This research could be used to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each country with regard to sustainable development, and by analyzing the measures taken by Norway and other countries with very high sustainability, by continuous improvement processes, reach similar levels of sustainable development.