ABSTRACT
Flood is categorized as one of the most catastrophic natural hazards worldwide. The process of planning and decision-making for the management of flood risk tends to be rather complicated and unsure. More specifically, decision-makers may encounter several intervention options that do not fully outperform or dominate each other with respect to assessment criteria. Hence, multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) can be a helpful tool in flood-risk management, to analyze potential alternatives with assessment criteria and provide stakeholders with a better picture of the impacts of the alternatives to make informed decisions. MCDM incorporates widely used techniques to concurrently analyze the multiple impacts of natural hazards such as floods, based on the various aspects of assessment. This chapter aims to provide a detailed review on the applications of MCDM methods to flood-risk management. The recently proposed and widely applied MCDM methods in the literature are presented, and their application in real-world flood-related problems are also investigated. Multiple criteria related to various aspects of sustainability, including social, environmental, economic, and technical criteria related to the flood-risk management can be evaluated through MCDM methods. Therefore, using MCDM methods is highly recommended for flood-risk management in real-world cases studies.
