Soil environmental criteria in six representative developed countries: soil management targets, and human health and ecological risk assessment

Abstract

Soil pollution is a global problem. As one of the important tools for contaminated land management, much attention has been given to soil environmental criteria (SEC) in some countries. However, most of the current researches on SEC are concentrated in several developed countries. For other countries that need to establish SEC, learning the experience of developed countries can promote the development of SEC. This paper systematically described the development of SEC in the USA, the Netherlands, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In addition, the process of deriving SEC in these countries was comprehensively compared and analyzed from the aspects of human health risk and ecological risk. The results show that the USA and the Netherlands developed SEC earlier and formed a relatively complete system. Health risk assessment and ecological risk assessment are the main methods to establish SEC in the world. The differences in the derivation of SEC in different countries are mainly reflected in the establishment of conceptual site models, the selection of calculation methods and the determination of data. It is suggested that other countries should strengthen the research on risk-based theoretical method systems and pay attention to the localization research of SEC. This paper highlights the importance of establishing SEC based on local realities. Furthermore, it can provide a reference and scientific basis for the establishment of SEC in developing countries, and provide scientific support for soil environmental management.

Graphical abstract

Keywords:

• Derivation methods
• ecological risk
• health risk
• soil environmental criteria

HANDLING EDITORS:

• Dan Tsang and Lena Ma

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2019YFC1804601) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42177221). We also appreciate the valuable comments and suggestions from Prof. Lena Q. Ma and anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.