# 128

Dear Onwusameka Sonny Ogbowuokara, Tambari Gladson Leton, John Nwenearizi Ugbebor, Ochuko Felix Orikpete

I have read your paper

The relative contribution of various anthropogenic sources to atmospheric methane in Rivers State, Nigeria: A multi-criteria decision analysis approach

My comments

1- In page 4 you say: “Organization METHod for Enrichment Evaluations (PROMETHEE), and Elimination and Choice Expressing Reality (ELECTRE). Among these, our study has chosen to use the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), as developed by Saaty (1977), for its robust and well-established framework in handling complex decision-making processes”

I think that you would need to define what robustness is.

In addition, what framework are you referring to? The lineal hierarchy?

Perhaps you ignore that AHP in unable to address complex scenarios for many reasons, and one of them being the lineal hierarchy

The AHP as a descriptive method; it does not determine criteria weights because there is no reasoning and no analysis, it just provides intuitionistic values that respond to the DM mood and feeling.

Since this is something very personal, and perhaps useful for the DM own activities, they are irrelevant in real scenarios because they do not represent real-life conditions, it is simply guessing, which may be different from another DM.

Regarding its ability to incorporate diverse data types, this is true, and it is what done for any MCDM method.

2- In page 4 “It provides qualitative sensitivity measures by ranking input factors in order of importance but does not quantify the extent to which one factor is more important than another (Chen et al., 2013)”

I guess that for you input factors are the criteria, and effectively, it ranks them according to the DM estimates. I do not understand the second part of the sentence by Chen et al, because the different criteria values indicate their relative importance. I believe it would be convenient to clarify this.

3- In page 4 you say: “The method can be unwieldy when dealing with numerous criteria or alternatives”

Criteria or alternatives? Are both the same for you? In some place you call alternatives as variables, which is correct, and in other you call them ‘factors’, that you identify to criteria

In another place you say: “From the literature, we identified several criteria known to be involved in the emission of atmospheric methane and then excluded those criteria perceived to have an insignificant impact on”

In appears that criteria are also sources? Criteria do not emit anything; they only indicate how much emissions each alternative produce

Let’s see if I understand the problem:

Objective: You want to determine which is the source that produces the largest emissions of methane

Sources: AG, FF, LF, OC, WE.

Where are the criteria that evaluate these sources for methane emissions, for instance: Temperature, turbidity, size, emission rate, pesticides, solar radiation, winds, etc.

For each source you need a value for each one of these criteria. Where are they?

It appears that you evaluated sources or alternatives without considering these criteria. My question is, on what ground did you evaluate each variable?

What you did not perform, MCDM, since criteria is totally missing

4- In page 9 “By aligning the method's results with both historical literature and contemporary survey data, we aimed to ensure a comprehensive validation and verification process, thereby bolstering confidence in the method's applicability and precision”

In my opinion, you cannot align the method’s results with other, because there is no problem equals to another; there may be many differences that depend on the characteristics of the scenario. Most important, validation of results is impossible, because we do not know the true result with which we can compare our own.

5- The values of your Table 2 appear to be completely subjective. It would be interesting to learn how you got those values

I hope these few comments may be of help

Nolberto Munier