ELECTRE III for Strategic Environmental Assessment: A “Phantom” Approach

The Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) is a systematic evaluation process of the environmental consequences of urban and territorial plans and programs which aims to guarantee a high degree of environmental protection and to contribute to integrating environmental factors during the design, adoption, and approval of plans and programs. Even if in Europe the SEA was already included in the legislation of each European Member State as of 2017, in these countries—and particularly in Italy—there is a diffuse lack of indications on procedures and/or evaluation protocols. In this article, the use of evaluation techniques in SEA is discussed. The specific objective of the research is the construction of an evaluation method to express a synthetic judgement—based on acknowledged, objective parameters—within the SEA procedure. According to the literature review, results regarding the SEA procedure, and its possible supporting methodologies, Multi Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) appears to be the most SEA-coherent approach. Moreover, the ELECTRE method family has shown the highest suitability to perform the evaluation phase of SEA. Hence, an operational development of ELECTRE III is herein proposed and applied to a case study.