Coastal Management Issues in Queensland and application of the Multi-Criteria Decision Making techniques

Abstract

Coastal management in Australia has been improved over late 20th century. As it is known, Australia has a three-tier system of government. These tiers include the Commonwealth, the State and Territory governments, and local governments. The Commonwealth Coastal Policy has been released by Government in 1995. Despite this Policy, it should be considered that the Commonwealth has historically played no significant role in coastal management in Australia and it has been characterized by state domination and, local governments are empowered by state legislation to exercise certain planning controls in coastal area. In Queensland, Coastal Protection and Management Act has been established in 1995 and consequently the State Coastal Plan commenced on 27 February 2002. This plan describes how the coastal zone of Queensland is to be managed. For more detailed planning and management, the Queensland Coastal Management Plan has been divided into eleven regions. In order to remain relevant, these regional coastal plans have to be reviewed every seven years. This paper presents an application of Multi-Criteria Decision Making Techniques as an approach to deal with reviewing regional coastal plans. Two techniques including of Analytic Hierarchy process and Fuzzy AHP have been selected to obtain preference weights of land suitability criteria in a case study area located in south-east Queensland. These techniques have proved useful to handle the problems which involve the design of alternatives which optimize the objectives. On the other hand it enables researchers to put more experts' knowledge together to make more precise decision and moderate personal judgments.