Evaluating climate change policies through the spherical fuzzy best-worst based score prioritization method

Climate change policies involve complex decision-making processes that require the simultaneous evaluation of multiple criteria under uncertainty. Therefore, the systematic prioritization of policy areas is important for conducting the decision-making process in a more consistent and analytically interpretable manner. This study proposes the Spherical Fuzzy Best-Worst-Based Score Prioritization Method (SF-BWSPM) for prioritizing climate change policy criteria under uncertainty. The proposed approach combines the best-worst comparison logic with the uncertainty representation capacity of Spherical Fuzzy Sets (SFSs), thereby enabling expert evaluations to be handled in a more flexible and comprehensive way.

The application was carried out on six main policy criteria relevant to Turkey's efforts to combat climate change, based on the evaluations of five expert decision-makers in the field of climate policy. The qualitative judgments of the experts were aggregated using spherical fuzzy operators, and the relative priority weights of the criteria were obtained through a score-based transformation and normalization process. The findings indicate that reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is the highest-priority criterion, followed by carbon pricing policies and energy efficiency.

To support the analytical structure of the method, a Score-Based Consistency Assessment was employed in order to examine the internal coherence of expert evaluations within the spherical fuzzy environment. Comparative analyses with the classical Best-Worst Method (BWM) and Spherical Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (SF-AHP) suggest that the proposed approach produces a prioritization pattern that is analytically meaningful and broadly aligned with comparable methods, while operating with a limited number of pairwise comparisons. Accordingly, the findings should be interpreted as an expert-panel-based analytical illustration of the proposed method in Turkey's climate-policy context, rather than as definitive or nationally representative policy guidance.