environmental planning
Introduction
Since the first postwar period OR techniques have been widely and succesfully implemented in a wide variety of managerial problems encountered in the industrialised world. In the last two decades, a major challenge for OR theorists and practitioners is to investigate the transferability of the experience gained towards the less developed countries, as well as to effectively cope with the new problems emerging from the developmental procedure. Environmental crisis appears as the most severe among these problems because its many different aspects threaten the development itself. The relationships linking the economic, natural and social systems lead to a redefinition of the concept of development as to encompass not only economic growth but also the stability of the ecosystem and the well-being of the society.
Since the environment is the point of reference of any human, economic or social activity, environmental planning comes out as a necessary function for the design of the desired future and for finding effective ways for achieving sustainability.
During the last decades, environmental problems have given rise to complex decision issues, which are receiving increasing social attention and are becoming more and more important, not only for human welfare, but even for human survival. Involvement in Environmental Planning decisions has become a major challenge for OR. Issues of methodology and applications of OR concerning environmental decision making include among others:
- Environmental decision support systems.
- Environmental impact assessment.
- Environmental issues in business strategy.
- Environmental issues in production management and control.
- Environmental forecasting.
- Monitoring networks.
- Locational analysis.
- Risk and reliability.
- Environmental review, auditing and reporting.
- Life cycle analysis.
- Ecodesign.
- Environmental marketing and communication.
In fact, a short look at the literature related either to OR/MS or to environmental issues shows that these opportunities have already been quite extensively exploited by operational researchers. However, it is still not clear which are the particular stages of the environmental planning procedure needing assistance from OR/MS. It is also not yet visible at which particular topics this research is directed and which OR techniques are used to fulfil the research requirements. Since the area is still under development, such a knowledge can considerably assist in revealing actual trends and main findings, as well as in identifying major deficiencies, either in the issues covered or in the OR techniques used.