Multi-criteria approach for evaluating long term water strategies

Long-term national water strategies, which are formulated to cope with the socio-economic development plans, have either positive or negative impacts in several domains including environment, economy, and social life. Intuitive evaluation of policies and actions on the basis of their social, economic, and environmental utilities is ambiguous and very complex, Setting water resources policies for a country like Egypt is a good example of this type of complexity due to its multisectoral, interdisciplinary, interrelated environment. There is a classical assumption in water resources planning and management that stipulates decisions based on optimization of a well-defined single objective. In reality, the decision-making process is much more complex. Decision makers seek an optimal compromise among several objectives or try to achieve satisfying levels of their goals. Therefore, the present study proposes the multi-criteria analysis as an approach for evaluating Egypt's long term plans to reveal their rank and behavior throughout the foreseen planning horizon. Several evaluation criteria (indicators) have been articulated and grouped into four main categories., water, environment, social, and economy. A simple empirical simulation model was used to score different criteria. Four cases have been compared and evaluated by the suggested approach. Each case represents an anticipated national water-related development plan. This is carried out under specific scenarios for uncontrolled variables such as population growth rate, hydrological river flow into the system, and others. The application showed that a multi-criteria approach could contribute significantly to the decision making process in Egypt. It provides a systematic way of presenting the tradeoffs among policy choices considering many issues.