Project evaluation has to consider financial and environmental impacts
including human, physical and ecological. Currently, the evaluation process in
the city of Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), does not take all these
impacts into consideration despite the issuance of the general environmental
regulations in 2001 that necessitate the implementation of an Environmental
Impact Assessment (EIA) studies at the feasibility stage of projects, which
might cause adverse effects on environment.
The main objective of this research is to develop a Decision Support System
(DSS) that integrates these impacts into one model to evaluate coastal resort
projects along Red Sea coast at feasibility stage.
The proposed system is composed of two main components, the environmental
and the financial assessment. First, the system assesses the environmental
impacts of the project using fuzzy logic technique by calculating the Decision
Making Coefficient (DMC). The DMC value is compared to the baseline of the
city of Jeddah, which is developed in this research. Those projects that have
DMC values greater than the baseline of Jeddah, suitable mitigation measures
should be proposed to eliminate their adverse environmental impacts. Second,
the system evaluates financially the projects that have no adverse
environmental impacts by calculating Net Present Value (NPV), Internal Rate
of Return (IRR), Payback Period (PBP), Profitability Index (PI), Debt Service
Coverage Ratio (DSCR), and Mitigation Cost/Project Cost (MC/PC).
The system is validated using three existing coastal resort projects in the city of
Jeddah. The validation results showed that the three case study projects were
environmentally and financially feasible.