Elsevier

Environment International

Volume 65, April 2014, Pages 16-32
Environment International

Regional risk assessment approaches to land planning for industrial polluted areas in China: The Hulunbeier region case study

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2013.12.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Spatial analysis of regional risks posed by industrial plants on regional receptors

  • Integration of environmental risk and socio-economic assessments in Hulunbeier region

  • Integration of vulnerability factors through a MCDA methodology and expert judgment

  • Analysis of the industrial plants' hazards according to their operation conditions

Abstract

The rapid industrial development and urbanization processes that occurred in China over the past 30 years has increased dramatically the consumption of natural resources and raw materials, thus exacerbating the human pressure on environmental ecosystems. In result, large scale environmental pollution of soil, natural waters and urban air were recorded. The development of effective industrial planning to support regional sustainable economy development has become an issue of serious concern for local authorities which need to select safe sites for new industrial settlements (i.e. industrial plants) according to assessment approaches considering cumulative impacts, synergistic pollution effects and risks of accidental releases. In order to support decision makers in the development of efficient and effective regional land-use plans encompassing the identification of suitable areas for new industrial settlements and areas in need of intervention measures, this study provides a spatial regional risk assessment methodology which integrates relative risk assessment (RRA) and socio-economic assessment (SEA) and makes use of spatial analysis (GIS) methodologies and multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) techniques. The proposed methodology was applied to the Chinese region of Hulunbeier which is located in eastern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, adjacent to the Republic of Mongolia. The application results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed methodology in the identification of the most hazardous and risky industrial settlements, the most vulnerable regional receptors and the regional districts which resulted to be the most relevant for intervention measures since they are characterized by high regional risk and excellent socio-economic development conditions.

Introduction

In China, the rapid industrialization of last three decades has created enormous economic and environmental challenges. Nowadays China has already overtaken the United States in industrial and agricultural production and become the world's largest “manufacturing factory”. As a result of economic reform and opening up, annual industrial added value growth averaged 11.5% in 1978–2004, more than two percentage points higher than Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth (Yu, 2011). China has already become number one in the output of iron and steel, coal, cement, chemical fertilizers and television sets in 2008 (WTO, 2008). Meantime, industrialization and urbanization have put great pressure on water, land, energy, raw materials and other natural resources (Yu, 2011). The coexistence of population and resources has become even a more prominent issue. China's resources are lower than the world average per capita, yet current loss of natural resources is one of the biggest in the world. China has the world's large consumer of water (15.4% of the world's total); China has the world's largest emission of polluted waters (three times that of the United States). It ranks second place in the world in energy consumption and CO2 emission and it is likely to overtake the United States to become the world's No. 1 (Schipper, 2005). With the rapid industrialization, the demand for natural resources and raw materials has risen rapidly. The human pressure on resources has caused tremendous damage to ecological and environmental systems.

China's environment is deteriorating in its ecological functions, and its capacity to resist natural adversity is weakening (China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, 2007). Despite restoration efforts, ecological deterioration is growing in scope, dimension and scale of the damage. As results, declining of forest quality, grassland degradation, accelerated desertification, soil erosion, serious water loss, worsening of water quality, pollution in agricultural and rural areas, serious food safety problems, alien species invasion, sharp reduction of biodiversity and the loss of genetic resources are increasingly recorded (China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, 2007). The government's own estimate puts the initial cost of environmental clean-up at a minimum of 214.67 billion RMB. As a result, environmental legal disputes are on the rise. In 2008, there were 95,000 disputes concerning environmental pollution, according to Ministry of Environmental Protection of People's Republic of China (Ministry of Environmental Protection of the People's Republic of China (MEP) and National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2008). Since the approval of the draft Environmental Protection Law of PRC in 1979, China's environmental law framework has grown to include more than 20 State Council regulations, standards and other regulatory documents. The major laws include the Law of PRC on Prevention and Control of Atmospheric Pollution, Law of PRC on Prevention and Control of Water Pollution and the Law of PRC on Environmental Impact Assessment. Laws now cover forestry, fisheries, protection of wildlife and marine areas, desertification prevention, clean production, solid waste disposal and several other areas. However, implementation of environmental regulations may not so effective as expected.

Considering that the industrial development has contributed significant stress to both urban and natural environment and taking into account the requirements of industrial planning and regional sustainable economy development, the selection of a safe site for new industrial settlements has become an issue of serious concern for local authorities because of cumulative impacts, synergic pollution effects and risks of accidental releases.

Adequate assessment tools and the integration of human health and ecological risk assessment at regional scale are needed to approach land planning, especially industry planning.

Regional Risk Assessment (RRA) is an approach to estimate and compare environmental impacts affecting large geographic areas (Hunsaker et al., 1990) characterized by multiple sources releasing multiple stressors which affect multiple habitats and endpoints. The RRA approach is based on relative risk assessment methodologies that rank risks in terms of their magnitude, in order to identify the polluting industrial settlements which cause higher regional risks and the regional receptors which could be adversely affected by the presence of the industrial settlements (Landis, 2005).

Although, there are 20 sensitive areas with environment pollution risk listed in News Bulletin No. 13 (April 5th, 2006) issued by the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) of China (MEP, 2006), RRA has not been widely applied in China so far. Xu et al. (2004) developed a method of regional Ecological Risk Assessment (ERA) which has been applied to a wetland case study in the Yellow River Delta in China. Liu et al. (2008) and Liu et al. (2010) analyzed the influence of different road network scenarios on landscape and regional ecological risk, and the impacts of industry, agriculture and animal husbandry potential risk sources on the aquatic environment of the Luanhe River Basin, respectively. These works, however, did not include considerations concerning the impacts on human health and the influence of socio-economic aspects in analyzed regional risk scenarios.

The objective of this study is to provide an integrated methodology for regional risk assessment (i.e. environmental and socio-economic assessments) which supports decision makers in the identification of environmentally suitable localizations for new industrial settlements and in the selection of areas requiring intervention measures to reduce the actual risk for human health and the environment, as well as to improve socio-economic conditions. The developed methodology was applied to the Chinese region of Hulunbeier which extends over ca. 253,000 km2, of which ca. 33486 km2 are protected areas, with protection provided either by state, or province (i.e. county) or local governments (Yang and Xie, 2000). The region is under fast industrial growth and extensive economic development which can result unsustainable and provide serious long term threats to the environment.

Section snippets

Methods

The proposed methodology to support Chinese local authorities in the planning of industrial sustainable development at regional scale was adapted from the regional risk assessment methodology reported in Zabeo et al. (2011), Pizzol et al. (2011) and Agostini et al. (2012), and is composed of the three main phases reported in Fig. 1: the regional risk assessment phase, the socio-economic assessment phase and the integrated assessment phase.

The next sections will describe the methodological

The study area

Hulunbeier region, located in eastern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Province, consists of 13 districts, borders the Republic of Mongolia in the west, Heilongjiang Province in the east and Russia in the north with Arguna River which represents the boundary. The Daxing'anling Mountains stretch through the central region of Hulunbeier from the northeast to the southwest. The total surface of the region is about 253,000 km2, it is 700 km long from north to south and 630 km wide from east to west. The

Conclusion

The proposed methodology provides a holistic approach to evaluate the environmental and socio-economic conditions of the region under analysis and may be used to support more efficient and effective regional land planning mainly related to environmentally safe and economically profitable industrial settlement localization. Therefore, the classification of the districts on the basis of both regional risk and socioeconomic conditions as well as the identification of the most vulnerable regional

Acknowledgments

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 269233 — GLOCOM (Global contaminated land management).

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