Assessing Water Quality in Payments for Environmental Services

The strategy of payment for environmental services (PES) has been increasingly present in current environmental policies, due to the acknowledgment that new mechanisms are needed to stimulate the conservation and maintenance of life-supporting services, such as the services of water provision to populations and to agricultural purposes. Nevertheless, some difficulties related to the lack of consistent methodologies to analyze the efficiency and water quality are verified. The chapter applies a methodology based in an adaptive neutral fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) approach to assess water quality. With this purpose, a water quality index is developed through a fuzzy reasoning. The relative importance of water quality indicators involved in the fuzzy inference process is modeled using a multi-attribute decision-aiding method. In recent years, fuzzy-logic-based methods have demonstrated to be appropriate to address uncertainty and subjectivity in environmental problems.