Researchers from TRANSrisk partner National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and Universidad de Jaen have developed an interesting paper entitled "A group decision making tool for assessing climate policy risks against multiple criteria".
The study explores how multiple criteria decision analysis can bridge the gap between climate policy studies and experts, by delving into the literature and reaching a methodological framework appropriate for solving complex problems of this particular problem domain, featuring multiple alternatives, criteria and decision makers.
More particularly, the paper makes an extensive review of climate policy related studies in the multicriteria decision making literature, in order to assess their scope and explore the applicability of different methodological MCDA frameworks in the climate policy domain. Consequently, the TOPSIS MCDA approach is selected in order to develop a decision support tool that can both support climate policy making by means of an appropriate MCDA methodology and emphasise the desired group decision making aspect. Thus, a Behavioural TOPSIS-oriented methodological framework is introduced and a dedicated spreadsheet-based tool (MACE-DSS) that can support this process, with the capacity of enabling disagreement-driven consensus control and building, is developed and presented. Finally, the analytical framework is applied in a case study aiming to assess different climate policy instruments against implementation risks in the Greek building, energy and transport sectors towards the desired low carbon transformation.
The paper is available online here.
