Applying a Decision Analysis Model

The goal of impact assessment is to understand what will happen if a decision is implemented and to quantify and characterise the effects of possible solutions across relevant criteria (e.g. environmental, economic, social).

The goal of this phase is to map indicator impacts that are measured by some natural scales (e.g. tonnes of CO2, costs in euros, biodiversity index value, expert evaluation scale, etc.) onto a unified value scale, with the aim to make the impacts comparable with each other.

Preference elicitation is a phase where the stakeholders’ values, priorities, and trade-offs are formally identified and structured so they can be incorporated into a decision model. 

In this phase, the decision analysis model is used to calculate the results based on the information gathered and modelled in the previous phases.