Integrated assessment for supporting decision making with multiple criteria

Institute for Energy Economics and the Rationale Use of Energy (IER) University of Stuttgart - Stuttgart, Germany

Published online: 27 August 2015

Abstract

Decisions about the development of the energy system should take all relevant criteria into account, including costs and health, environmental and climate impacts. As usually no decision alternative fulfils all criteria better than all other alternatives, a weighting between the indicators that show the degree of fulfilment of the criteria, is necessary. In the following the “impact pathway approach” is described that supports decisions by using weighting factors that are derived from measuring or observing the preferences of the population. The methodology is applied to rank technologies for generating electricity according to their social costs, which is a summary indicator comprising simultaneously costs, impacts of air pollution on health and biodiversity and climate impacts.