Environment systems & decisions最新文献

The coasts of the Mediterranean basin are exposed to the ongoing effects of climate change and anthropogenic pressure. Low elevated coastal plains, river deltas, lagoons and reclamation areas are experiencing beach retreat, coastal erosion and marine flooding. This makes them particularly vulnerable to sea level rise (SLR), which is expected to increase up to 1 m by 2100 AD, according to the projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In this study, selected stakeholders from four Mediterranean coastal areas that are highly vulnerable to the impacts of SLR have been engaged through a structured participatory process for the development of solution-oriented, case-specific and site-specific Policy Tools to address SLR. The developed Policy Tools for the Venice Lagoon, the Metaponto reclamation area and the Basento river mouth, in Italy, the Ebro River Delta in Spain, and the coastal plain of Chalastra, near the Axios River Delta, in Greece, contain relevant, effective and implementable actions stemming from stakeholder interaction and consensus building. The interconnected stakeholder engagement steps employed in this study identified relevant issues that should be considered when defining SLR adaptation policies to bridge knowledge and perception gaps, facilitate knowledge exchange and foster social learning through structured science communication on SLR. This participatory stakeholder process can lay the foundations for more extensive participation in public processes through which the resulting Policy Tools can materialise into collectively accepted, concrete actions to help vulnerable areas adapt to the expected SLR and consequent coastal hazards by the end of this century.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10669-023-09910-5.

All three pillars of sustainability must be met for a construction project to be considered sustainable. Although several studies have been carried out on sustainability in the construction industry under uncertain conditions, there has been a lack of a comprehensive model to assess all three pillars of sustainability during the execution of a construction project with consideration of the uncertain and unreliable nature of the gathered data. In this article, a fuzzy inference system model was developed to fill this research gap. The Cost Performance Index from earned value management, an effective tool for cost control of projects, is used to assess the economic sustainability status during the project execution. Besides, from the expert opinions and literature review, sustainability-related attributes are gathered to identify the dimensions and enablers of a construction project. This research aimed not only to improve the previous social sustainability Indexes for construction projects by using Z-numbers but also to develop and introduce a comprehensive Z Construction Environmental Sustainability Index alongside the other two pillars. The previous hierarchal method to calculate the Fuzzy indexes is also improved to overcome possible complexity problems. Calculating the three pillars of sustainability and using them as inputs into the Mamdani FIS model to obtain the overall sustainability status, the proposed model, which is calculated with the Z-numbers, is compared with the results of conventional Fuzzy numbers and deterministic approach. The results of the comparison show that the proposed model is more rigorous and effective than the previous methods in the numerical case.