ABSTRACT
The Anhumas creek watershed, in the region of Campinas, São Paulo State, Brazil, is degraded also as a result of unplanned land use of its riparian zones, considered Permanent Preservation Areas (APP). Therefore, river flow is unstable, promoting frequent flood damages, besides the lack of several environmental functions of its APPs. Environmental recovery of a degraded area requires a comprehensive effort, often multidisciplinary. Multicriterial analysis is a tool which allows gathering a diversity of attributes of the studied subject, weighing and valuating them, helping in the decision making effort. This work aims to apply two methods of multicriteria analysis to optimize the selection of a watershed for an environmental recovery study of APPs in the Anhumas watershed. The Anhumas watershed was divided in 7 sub-basins aiming the selection of one of those to implement an environmental planning study and to establish and rank areas that should be prioritized for recovery. Thirteen environmental criteria were selected for application of multicriteria analysis using the methods of Compromise Programming (PC) and Cooperative Game Theory (CGT). Relevance of each criterion to the analysis was given by a questionnaire answered by specialists. Basin selection results showed no difference neither between PC and CGT nor between mean or mode used to standardize weights given by specialists. Multicriteria analysis was effective, but allowed enough flexibility for the decision maker (DM) to adjust undesired analysis distortions. After DM adjustments, the priority basins were ranked as basins 4 > 7 > 5 > 6 > 2 > 3 > 1. Important procedures when carrying out such an analysis were to avoid conceptual overlapping among different criteria, to implement appropriate value judgment for each criterion and to use decision maker expertise to supplement weights obtained with specialists.
Keywords:
Permanent preservation areas; Anhumas creek - Campinas; compromise programming; cooperative game theory