Resilience in agroecosystems: an index based on a socioecological systems approach

This article presents an agroecosystem resilience index (ARI) relative to two types of exogenous drivers: biophysical and socioeconomic threats. The ARI is based on a theoretical framework of socioecological systems and draws upon multicriteria analysis. The multicriteria consists of variables related to natural, productive, socioeconomic, and institutional systems that are weighted and grouped through expert judgment. The index was operationalized in the Rio Grande Basin (RGB), in the Colombian Andes. The ARI was evaluated at the household level using information from 99 RGB households obtained through workshops, individual semistructured interviews, and surveys. The ARI is a continuous variable that ranges between zero and one and results in five categories of resilience: very low, low, medium, high, and very high. When faced with climate change impacts, 19% of households showed low resilience, 64% medium resilience, and 16% high resilience according to the ARI. When faced with price fluctuations, 23% of households showed low resilience, 65% medium resilience, and 11% high resilience. Key variables associated with high resilience include the diversity of vegetation cover, households that have forests on their properties, a high degree of connectivity with other patches of forest, diversification of household economic activities, profitability of economic activities, availability of water sources, and good relationship with local institutions.

SOLVING SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES AND VALUING TOURISTIC POTENTIAL USING GIS-BASED TECHNOLOGY STUDY CASE: BIOUGRA CITY, MOROCCO

In the last 2 decades, Morocco has known rapid growth of urban transformation followed by significant Population growth, which causes serious environmental problems related to water pollution and scarcity, and social with the deficiencies of infrastructures. And this has been witnessed in the city of Biougra which requires taking serious steps and adopting new projects to solve these issues as soon as possible. And as a reflection of that, this paper takes advantage of Geographic information system (GIS) coupled tools in the first place to locate future sites for building new schools using weighted overlay analysis approach, to improve the education system. And in the second place to choose potential sites for implementing new wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) by adopting multicriteria analysis (MCA). Finally, as a part of saving cultural heritage, and improving the social and economic situation for local citizens, we aim to value cooperative of this region as a replacement of poor touristic quality in the city, by making a track of the existing cooperative and profit from 3d modeling as a part of providing the traveler the best possible guide to reach these points of interest and also develop a desktop application for editing and manipulating different types of file related to cooperatives. This study showed successful results by localizing a new site to build a school in the northeastern of the city, and a match between the found site for WWTP and the existing station but with giving a possibility for expansion.

Sustainability Evaluation of Cold In-Place Recycling and Hot Mix Asphalt Pavements: A Case of Qassim, Saudi Arabia

The construction of conventional hot mix asphalt (HMA) pavements results in a number of economic and environmental issues, such as the cost of new overlays and associated impacts on natural resources. Although the cold recycling with an emulsified asphalt-recycling agent holds certain benefits over the HMA, its implementation on different road types, ranging from farm-to-market roads to expressways, is yet contentious due to the need for sophisticated equipment and trained workforce. The present research developed a methodology to evaluate all the three dimensions of sustainability, including economic (construction cost), environmental (natural resource depletion), and social (need for advanced equipment and skilled labor) of various scenarios of RAP and conventional asphalt pavements. The present study evaluated an equivalent thickness of the Cold In-place Recycling (CIR) pavement, which behaves similar to HMA pavement under the influence of different traffic loads. Fifty CIR and HMA scenarios for different traffic volumes and pavement layers thicknesses were developed. Finally, the sustainability of all the scenarios was evaluated for traffic designation in Saudi Arabia using fuzzy-based multicriteria analysis. Ranking of scenarios found CIR as a more sustainable overlay option for the feeders, collectors, main urban streets, expressways, and heavily trafficked highways in industrial areas where ESALs (Equivalent Single Axle Loads) range between 2,000,000 and >31,000,000. Considering the limited availability of advanced equipment and skilled labor for CIR pavements, HMA was found be a more sustainable option for farm-to-market roads with the “very light” traffic class. The methodology will help the pavement managers in decision making regarding the selection of sustainable pavement technologies for different road types in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the world.

The Intuitionistic Fuzzy FlowSort Method for Multicriteria Group Decision Making

The real life problems are multidimensional in nature and may involve some ambiguity when it comes to decision making. It is, therefore, difficult to design the evaluation criteria precisely and determine the exact value of the attributes in the multicriteria analysis. The intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS) achieved great success in treating this kind of ambiguity in a great deal of research. The study of sorting problems is an active research issue in the multiple criteria decision aid (MCDA) area. This paper investigated one of the sorting methods, FLOWSORT, and extended it to the multicriteria group decision making based on the output aggregation of the individual sorting results. The rating of each alternative was described through linguistic terms that can be expressed in triangular intuitionistic fuzzy numbers. An illustrative example as well as an empirical comparison with other multi-criteria decision making methods were carried out to validate our extension.

Competitiveness of the Selected Countries of the EU with a Focus on the Quality of the Business Environment

The business environment and entrepreneurship are important elements in the economic growth of each country. The better the business environment a given country offers, the more attractive the country is for small and large companies as well as for private entrepreneurs. A high level of business competitiveness can help a country secure economic growth, especially after overcoming a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Many institutions focus on the measurement of the business environment using indices to evaluate its quality. The main goal of the present study is to evaluate the quality of the business environment through multicriteria analysis. For the period from 2018 to 2020, the data were analysed by using seven selected indices of the weighted sum approach (WSA) and the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) methods. The research sample included all EU countries that joined the EU at the same time in 2004. The processing of analytical data was gradually implemented by using descriptive statistics and multicriteria evaluation methods. The methods used in the multicriteria evaluation of variants determined the rankings of the individual variants in terms of the selected criteria using entropy. We concluded that the efficiency of the business environments in Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia are below the EU average. Within this group of countries, Estonia, Malta and Slovenia have seen the largest regeneration of their business environment since having joined the EU.

ANALYSIS OF SOLAR ENERGY POTENTIAL BY REMOTE SENSING TECHNIQUES IN VARAŽDINSKA COUNTY, CROATIA

Renewable energy becomes more and more considered as energy production due to great benefits and less environmental impact then traditional energy sources. As a part of the European Union, Croatia agreed upon certain energy efficiency goal that need to be achieved during certain period. In this paper we analyse solar energy potential in northern part of Croatia, Varaždinska county. Remotely sensed data, CORINE land cover, digital elevation model, is used to perform multicriteria analysis. There are different solar panels considered: mono-crystalline silicon panels, poly-crystalline silicon panels, amorphous silicon panels, gallium arsenide panels and cadmium tellurium panels. Based on remote sensing data estimated yearly production of electric energy from solar potential could be from 8.40*107 to 2.43*1010 kWh depending on different slope of solar panels. Gallium arsenide panels shows best usability depending on slope estimated energy production is from 2.52*1010 to 7.30*1010 kW.