Validating the importance of criteria for assessing climate change scenarios

While evaluating climate impacts within different climate change scenarios, analysts and stakeholders may have different goals and therefore it is usually difficult to define a common decision-making framework applicable for various practical uses. In this paper, we combine two different group decision-making methodologies to prioritise criteria for assessing output information from regional climate models. The first is based on use of a multi-criteria analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to determine weights of criteria as cardinal information about their importance. The second methodology uses two voting methods, namely Borda count and Approval voting, to generate ordinal information (ranks) for criteria. A set of five criteria is assessed by 16 PhD students from the field of climatology, and generated decisions about their importance in the validation of regional climate models' quality are summarised, compared, and critically discussed. The paper is closed with recommendations for further research.