Sustainability and Multicriteria Decision-Making in Sediment Management in Hydropower Plants: A Systematic Literature Review

Sediment management in hydroelectric power plants has been mainly oriented by economic and technical aspects, unlike current management approaches, which also recognize the importance of integrating social and environmental aspects into decision-making. Consistent with this vision, the concept of corporate sustainability is proposed in the international literature as a management perspective in which the economic, environmental, and social dimensions are considered to guide management in organizations. This article aims to analyze recent studies on sediment management in hydroelectric power plants to evaluate how the corporate sustainability perspective is being integrated into the decision-making processes of sediment management. For this purpose, a systematic literature review was conducted, and its findings lead to the following conclusions: despite the growing interest in corporate sustainability and climate change in the literature, the percentage of publications that include the three dimensions of sustainability as criteria for choosing sediment management alternatives is low. In addition, it has been observed that the economic dimension is still the most relevant criterion for choosing sediment management techniques. Likewise, it has been observed that Multicriteria Decision-Making methods are widely used for selecting sediment management strategies in reservoirs. In the cases in which the three dimensions of corporate sustainability have been integrated into the decisional process, the most used methods are Multi-Attribute Decision-Making.