Sustainable Floodplain Management - Participatory Planning in the Red River Basin, Canada

Decision-making problems in water resources are often associated with multiple objectives and multiple stakeholders. To enable more effective and acceptable decision outcome, it is required that more participation is ensured in the decision making process. This is particularly relevant for flood management problems where the number of stakeholders could be very large. Although application of multi-objective decision-making tools in water resources is very wide, application with the consideration of multiple stakeholders is much more limited. The solution methodologies adapted for multi-objective multi-participant decision problems are generally based on aggregation of decisions obtained for individual decision makers. This approach seems somewhat inadequate when the number of stakeholders is very large, as often is the case in flood management. In the presented work, a methodology has been proposed to capture the views of multiple stakeholders using fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic. Three possible different response types: scale (crisp), linguistic (fuzzy), and conditional (fuzzy) are analyzed to obtain the resultant input by using Fuzzy Expected Value (Akter and Simonovic, 2004). Fuzzy Expected Value input is used with the multicriteria decision making tool named Fuzzy Compromise Programming (Bender and Simonovic, 2000), (Prodanovic and Simonovic, 2003). Comparison of different fuzzy set ranking methods (required for processing fuzzy information) is performed. The methodology has been applied to flood management in the Red River Basin. The Red River Basin in Canada faces periodical flooding and flood management decision-making problems are associated with multiple objectives and multiple stakeholders (Simonovic and Carson, 2003). While the results show successful application of the methodology, they also show the significant differences in opinion of the stakeholders within the basin.