The green economy for sustainable development: a spatial multi-criteria analysis - ordered weighted averaging approach in the siting process for short rotation forestry in the Basilicata Region, Italy

Abstract

Optimising bioenergy chains and the creation of a bio-energy district can make a positive contribution to territorial development, land use planning and employment, while reducing environmental pollution. Energy planning issues are complex problems with multiple decision makers and criteria. Given the spatial nature of the problem, the present paper proposes a spatial multi-criteria analysis approach for supporting decision makers in the site selection process for short rotation forestry planting in the Basilicata Region, southern Italy. The methodology applied in the decision-support system is ordered weighted averaging, extended by means of fuzzy linguistic quantifiers. The purpose of the research is to formulate a systematic procedure to analyse complex decision problems, while supplying decision makers with a flexible tool to decide on possible agro-energy policies. The outcomes of the analysis may support decision makers in defining targeted agro-energy policies and help the private sector to identify the most appropriate cropping plan.

A spatial analysis model to assess the feasibility of short rotation forestry fertigated with urban wastewater: Basilicata region case study

“…3). Based on the distribution of suitability values, poplar seems to be the species with the highest suitability for SRF in the region (Romano et al, 2013a). This confirms the findings of recent studies showing that willow is a more suitable species under the typical site-specific conditions of north-Europe countries (Dimitriou and Rosenqvist, 2011;IEA Bioenergy, 2011).…”

“…The method applied in this work is the OWA operator combined with relative linguistic quantifiers, as proposed by Romano et al (2013a). The choice of this method is justified by its greater flexibility as compared to MCE methods: actually a linguistic quantifier can better represent the decision maker's qualitative information than its perceived relation between different evaluation criteria, notably when a high number of maps are involved in the analysis.…”

“…Different literature studies have proposed GIS-based land use suitability models for identifying the most potentially suitable soils for SRF (Salvati et al, 2007;Romano et al, 2013a), but none of them has produced a model specifically targeted to identify the WWTPs that can be used for the fertigation of those soils. The use of this large scale analysis model would facilitate public and/or private decision-making for the establishment and spreading of vegetation filter systems.…”

“…The criterion maps and fuzzy functions used in the analysis are those proposed by Romano et al (2013a). The maps arranged according to their value and the value of calculated weights are shown in Table 2.…”

“…The multi-criteria evaluation methods applied for GIS-based land use suitability analysis are overlay Boolean operations, Weighted Linear Combination (WLC) and Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) methods (Heywood et al, 1995;Jankowski, 1995;Barredo, 1996;Beedasy and Whyatt, 1999;Malczewski, 2004;Romano and Cozzi, 2006;Romano et al, 2013a).…”