Analyzing the effectiveness of environmental impact assessment in Paraná, Brazil and California, United States with fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis and the analytical hierarchy process.

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) has become one of the most widespread environmental management instruments. Despite this, EIA is routinely criticized for being ineffective at impacting decision-making. This study compared the EIA systems of Paraná, Brazil and California, United States using the effectiveness dimensions from the EIA literature. This study formats the cases into contextual conditions using the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to identify the necessary or sufficient conditions that cause effective outcomes. These effectiveness outcomes are then ranked by EIA stakeholders via the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to identify stakeholder priorities and to improve stakeholder management. The results show that in Paraná stakeholders identified normative effectiveness as the most important dimension, while stakeholders in California identified this dimension as the second-most important following substantive effectiveness. Public participation was found to be a necessary condition for both substantive and normative effectiveness to occur. Early project definition was found to be sufficient for substantive effectiveness and necessary for normative effectiveness, for which stakeholder coordination was a sufficient condition. This suggests that in order for EIA to influence decision-making and foster sustainable development, greater care needs to be taken to actively engage stakeholders in public participation, with clear roles and project design communicated early on, and a clear role for regulatory authority to promote stakeholder coordination for acceptable outcomes. These findings suggest that some effectiveness dimensions are caused by similar conditions, which could help focus stakeholder management efforts and point to new avenues for future EIA effectiveness research.

Prioritization of absent quarantine pests in Brazil through the Analytical Hierarchy Process.

Introducing an Absent Quarantine Pest (AQP) can cause severe economic, social and environmental impacts, generating food insecurity. The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method is an excellent tool for prioritizing APQs, allowing countries to better prepare against these threats. This study aimed to determine which AQPs should be prioritized in Brazil. For this, 20 AQPs were selected from the Brazilian official list. The selection was based on pests intercepted by Brazil between 2015 and 2018 and by countries of the European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organization, in the international movement of plants. It can be concluded that out of the 20 AQPs studied, 17 are the priority and that the AHP method is effective for this purpose. Other countries from different continents can use this methodology to prioritize PQAs and thus create strategic plans to prevent entry into their territories and economic, social, and environmental impacts.

Energy Efficiency in the Food Industry: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract Governments and private companies have increased efforts to identify effective actions for improving energy efficiency in manufacturing processes. The objective of this work is to improve the decision-making process by increasing the quality of information related to energy indicators in the food industry. This research involves developing a systematic literature review (SLR) to identify energy efficiency indicators in the food industry, which serve as inputs for a sectoral evaluation based on multicriteria techniques. The SLR identified six criteria evaluated by food industry experts, which form the proposed basis for evaluating the performance of related sectors. These criteria are: benchmarks, key performance indicators, framework, monitoring, ISO 50001, and information communication technologies (ICTs) in sectoral evaluations. The criteria were evaluated by experts using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), which prioritizes the most important food industry issues using an evaluation scale. Weights were attributed to each issue and positioned according to the Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluations (PROMETHEE) to evaluate each sector by the identified criteria. The evaluated criteria are applicable to the three sectors surveyed, with emphasis on the beverage sector. Among the evaluated criteria, ICTs were highlighted by Industry 4.0 as a concern for the food sector.