Urban pluvial flood management part 1: Implementing an ahp-topsis multi-criteria decision analysis method for stakeholder integration in urban climate and stormwater adaptation

Cities are facing increasing pressures to enact adaptation measures due to climate change. While blue-green infrastructure has emerged as a focal adaptation technique for stormwater management, in order to craft adaptation policies cities must consider a multitude of emerging, complex, and competing stakeholder interests around multiple adaptation alternatives. However, accounting for these different interests, analyzing their diverse priorities, and maintaining a transparent decision-making process is not easily achieved within the existing policy frameworks. Here we define and present a combined multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) methods that easily integrates and quantifies stakeholder priorities while remaining accessible for non-experts engaged in the policy-making process. We demonstrate the method’s effectiveness through analyzing opinions about stormwater adaptation in New York City across several stakeholder groups. The method succeeds in integrating quantitative and qualitative judgements, indicating stakeholder preferential differences and allowing for more inclusive policy to be crafted. It can be extended beyond stormwater to many urban climate adaptation decisions facing multi-criteria considerations.