Establishment of multiple conflicting criteria in decision making processes to support revi- talization of transitional and post-mining regions

• Autor(a) principal: Regueira, José Manuel Camelo
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/138708
• topic: Mult-Criteria Decision Analysis; mine closure; MCDA criteria weighting; post-mining land use and revitalization; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Naturais::Ciências da Terra e do Ambiente

The mining industry not only plays a very significant role in the modern society, as it allows the access to mineral resources, but has been also fundamental throughout Human History. How- ever, there have been situations, especially in the past centuries, for which an adequate plan has not been considered to ensure adequate mine closure processes. In some cases, mines became abandoned, which brings strong negative impacts to the surrounding environment, the develop- ment of the regions and even to local communities. This dissertation was developed with the support of the EIT Project Reference 19075 “ReviRis: Revitalising Post-Mining Regions: Problems and Potential in RIS Europe” and its main objective consisted in establishing criteria and indicators to be considered in the rehabilitation of post-mining regions and in its supporting multi-criteria decision-analysis (MCDA) processes. MCDA is a valuable tool applicable to solve problems that are characterized as a choice among alternatives. In the present context, the aim of MCDA processes is to select the best rehabilitation option to be implemented in a specific mining area after its closure according to its site specific- ities. The selection of a post-mining land use considers a large amount of information that needs to be compared to reach a final decision. This information comes in different forms and is related with different subjects. Several MCDA methods have been developed. The general concept is closely the same: evaluate possible alternatives for a certain problem based on selected criteria. In most of the methods a weight (a relative importance) for each criterion is considered. In this study, five criteria groups were developed: economic, environmental, geoethical, technical and potential regional development. These criteria groups were then sub-divided in lower levels of more detail to allow a more precise evaluation. To test the established criteria and sub-criteria, distinct MCDA methods were applied to a Portuguese mining site - Urgeiriça. The results high- light the differences between distinct methods and show how the criteria weights play a very relevant role in the results, evidencing that the usage and management of the available information is crucial in problems of this type.