Trade-off Between Cost and Effectiveness of Control of Nutrient Loading into a Water Body

Bogardi, I., David, L., & Duckstein, L. (1983). Trade-off Between Cost and Effectiveness of Control of Nutrient Loading into a Water Body. IIASA Research Report. IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria: RR-83-019

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Abstract

A system consisting of a watershed and a water body is considered, and a methodology is presented for selecting the alternative scheme offering the best compromise between economic activity in the watershed and quality of the water body. The general problem is specified for the system of a watershed and a lake endangered by eutrophication. Both economic activity and eutrophication can be characterized by several criteria. The method is applied to actual data from a subwatershed of Lake Balaton, Hungary, where the economic objective is to minimize the sum of costs and losses for the various control measures and the environmental objective is to minimize the amount of P available for algal growth. Both of these objectives are decomposed into several criteria. The action space consists of six pure strategies, namely, the control of (1) point-source pollution, (2) fertilizer, (3) erosion, (4) land use, (5) runoff control, and (6) sediment yield. These six pure actions lead to the definition of eight mixed alternatives. The phosphorus-loading portion of the model is run repeatedly with different stochastic input sequences to account for hydrologic uncertainty and the corresponding environmental objective is expressed as the probability "uj" that alternative "j" results in the largest decrease of P-loading. Model parameters are estimated using available data or published tables and graphs. Compromise programming is used to find a trade-off (or satisfactum solution) that balances the two conflicting objectives. In order to facilitate further application of the methodology, several points are discussed such as the relationship between the lake and its catchment, the error in stochastic simulation, the consideration of various uncertainties, the effect of snowmelt, and possible coupling with detailed lake eutrophication models. Finally, a step-by-step summary of the methodology is given to facilitate application of the model to other cases. Multicriterion decision-making techniques are briefly reviewed in the appendix so that cases with more than two objectives may also be approached.

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