Introduction

The performance indicators developed in Chapter 9 reflect three objectives (net present value (NPV), environmental quality and spatial equity), which will be used to evaluate the scenarios. This section presents the results of this evaluation. Its aim is to rank the scenarios, to identify where trade-offs among objectives may be needed, to identify spatial features within the ranking, and to identify elements within the scenarios that bear further consideration in regional planning. A distinction is made between point evaluation (the subject of Section 10.2) and spatial evaluation (the subject of Section 10.3). This distinction is illustrated below in Fig. 10.5.

Point evaluation

The point evaluation stems from the performance indicators calculated for the region as a whole. Table 10.1 presents the results of calculating performance indicators, as outlined in the previous section. This table forms the basis for the evaluation.

The objective function for this evaluation is some mathematical combination of the three objectives appearing in Table 10.1. The form of this function is unknown, and it is further complicated by the use of different measurement units for each objective. Taken individually, each objective yields a different ranking of the scenarios, where > indicates ‘preferred to’: