Prioritize strategies to confront environmental deterioration in urban areas: Multicriteria assessment of public opinion and experts' views

Anthropogenic pressure on the urban environment has recently reached critical levels in numerous conurbations worldwide. In this context, taking specific measures as a response has become a necessity for environmental managers in an effort to confront such pressures and to move towards sustainable development. However, in practice, funding of abatement strategies is often limited and decision-makers are obliged to prioritize them in terms of performance, viability, social acceptance, maturity or other case-specific criteria. In order to arrive at an effective, successful and realistic bundle of measures, a consensus between experts and the public needs to be built. This paper aims at the development of a methodological approach that focuses on the multicriteria prioritisation of abatement strategies for urban areas. The developed methodology is demonstrated through its application on a real-world case study for the metropolitan area of Thessaloniki, Greece. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.