Development of Adaptive Environmental Management System: A Participatory Approach through Fuzzy Cognitive Maps

Abstract

Mining industries develop environmental management systems/plans to mitigate the impact their operations has on the society. Even with these plans, there are still issues of pollution affecting the society. Though there are ICT-based pollution monitoring solutions, their use is dismal due to lack of appreciation or understanding of the disseminated information. This result in mining communities depending on their own local knowledge to observe, monitor and predict miningrelated environmental pollution. However, this local knowledge has never been tested scientifically or analysed to recognize its usability or effectiveness. Mining companies tend to ignore this knowledge from the communities as it is treated like common information with no much scientific value. As a step towards verifying or validating this local knowledge, we demonstrate how fuzzy cognitive maps can be used to model, analyse and represent this linguistic local knowledge.