The decisions facing today's environmental managers are more complex than ever before. When dealing with complex sites involving multiple stakeholders, a number of factors, including internal and external stakeholder objectives, potential future risks, alternative redevelopment scenarios, and costs, must be carefully considered before a final decision can be made.

Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) is a process that is commonly used by businesses for a myriad of complex decisions (e.g., locating new facilities, retooling plants). MCDA goes beyond the bounds of traditional quantitative decision analysis (which considers only costs and risk) and incorporates criteria such as regulatory acceptance and internal stakeholder support to help identify the strategy that best meets overall project objectives. MCDA provides a transparent, common process for:

• Documenting objectives and preferences
• Recording key information and sources
• Identifying and managing uncertainties
• Listing viable strategies
• Providing powerful insights into likely outcomes, tradeoffs, risks and sensitivity to input assumptions
• Making technically defensible decisions
• Obtaining stakeholder agreements
• Modeling results such as financial risk profiles, objective function profiles and sensitivity analysis