AQUACULTURE STUDENT

ROXANA BAHRAMI

What They Did Back Then

* Master of Science in Aquaculture completed 2000, University of Guelph.

Advisor: Professor Richard D. Moccia

A multicriteria decision-making scheme for sustainable aquaculture development.

INTRODUCTION

An integrated decision-making process was one of the important outcomes of the United Nations Commission for Environment and Development Conference, 1992 (UNCED), and is a relatively new approach for decision-making. The overall objective of integrated decision-making is to improve the process so the considerations of both socio-economic and environmental issues is fully integrated, and a broader range of public participation is assured. The idea of integrated decision-making is the integration of environmental and socio-economic factors in different levels i.e. policy making, planning and management. According to the UNCED, some of the positive characteristics of integrated decision-making are; transparency, participation of the people and the delegation responsibility to the lowest appropriate level. (Robinson, 1993).

Therefore, an effective decision-making process for aquaculture should consider the economic aspects of development as well as the environmental and social. The objective of this project, then, was to develop an improved decision-making tool for the establishment of an aquacultural project. This goal will be met by identifying the various criteria that decision-makers need to consider and presenting an objective, formula-based method of incorporating these multiple criteria into a single, versatile, decision-making scheme. The decision-making scheme presented in this paper considers the environmental, social, cultural and political issues of aquaculture.