Comparison of three group decision-making frameworks for evaluating resilience time series of water resources systems under uncertainty

Abstract

This study compared three uncertainty-based decision-making frameworks (considering/not considering the hierarchical structure of stakeholders) using resilience-based indices for evaluating different water resources management (WRM) scenarios under the impacts of climate change. The first step involved identifying significant stakeholders in the study area and establishing their relative weights. In the next step, stakeholders were asked to evaluate the management scenarios in the three different decision-making frameworks based on their decision criteria (nine resilience-based indices, implementation cost, and employment). Different types of weights (explicit and interval) were assigned to each stakeholder and their decision criteria, to account for the uncertainty associated with estimating their respective weights. This methodology was applied to the case of the Zarrinehrud River basin in northwest Iran. The best management scenario identified (MSC1346) was able increase lake elevation by 2.6 m (from 1271.3 m to 1273.9 m), improve the resilience of the system by 25 %, and enhance provisioning ecosystem services such as water and food supply and regulating services such as air quality. Comparing the results of the three decision-making frameworks revealed that the two which considered the hierarchical structure of stakeholders were more effective in determining the best scenario. The best scenario selected in the framework that ignored the hierarchical structure of stakeholders (MSC13567) had USD 202 million higher overall implementation and construction costs and gave a negligible difference in resilience value (0.04 difference) compared with scenario MSC1346.

Keywords

• Resilience-based index
• Group decision-making framework
• Zarrinehrud River
• Uncertainty
• Two-point evidential reasoning