Application of environmental risk assessment for strategic decision-making in coastal areas: case studies in China

Abstract

Environmental risk assessment (ERA) is a powerful technical tool for analyzing potential and extreme adverse environmental impacts, and has found wide application in supporting decision-making processes over the last two decades. However, to date there has been no interrelated application of ERA to support the processes of strategic decision-making (SDM), especially in coastal areas.

In this paper, we attempt to verify the feasibility of the proposed integrated ERA–SDM approach and its methodology by applying it to two case studies (in Xiamen Bay and Luoyuan Bay) of the principal coastal functional zoning (PCFZ, a kind of SDM and similar to the coastal and marine spatial planning in western). The results show that the integrated ERA–SDM approach could integrate ERA into the entire SDM process, directly support the PCFZ, and avoid or mitigate dire environmental risk that can be introduced by SDM processes.

Keywords:

• environmental risk assessment
• strategic decision-making process
• principal coastal functional zoning
• Xiamen Bay
• Luoyuan Bay
• China

Acknowledgements

We thank Prof. David Klumpp (formerly of Australian Institute of Marine Science) from Xiamen University who kindly helped with valuable comments and language editing. We also gratefully acknowledge the comments provided by anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This project is financially supported by the National Public Welfare Research Project of State Oceanic Administration of China [grant number 200905005].