Multicriteria Decision Analysis for Flood Risk Management: The Case of the Mapai Dam at the Limpopo River Basin, Mozambique

Abstract

In this article, we present evaluations of the different scenarios for building the Mapai Dam in the Limpopo River Basin of Mozambique as an integral part of the flood risk management in the basin. The study used various decision analysis software packages such as V.I.S.A and Decide IT, which are basically instances of decision support systems. In order to perform the evaluation, we used sources available to assess the need and feasibility to build the Dam, which provides the basis for our analysis. We first structured the problem in order to make it more understandable through a value measurement tree, then built a decision making tree to develop different scenarios, whereby we compared their outputs based on a probabilistic analysis, according to their storage capacities. The results prove that the system is helpful in decision-making process, particularly when we face multiple choices.