Ecological risk assessment for key industrial development zones in the areas surrounding the Bo Sea in China

ABSTRACT

Although industrial zones have been attracting attention around the world due to their huge regional economic contributions, ecological risk assessment for industrial zones has gained little attention. In high ecological risk locations, landslides, earthquakes, and floods often occur, often causing extensive damage, including loss of human lives and property. However, during planning, development, and management of industrial zones, only the socioeconomic risks are usually taken into account and the risks of ecological factors affecting industries are often ignored. In this article, we put forward a procedure to link different risk factors and their GIS-determined spatial variation to estimate the ecological risk to key industrial zones in the 98,200 km² area surrounding the Bo Sea. The ecological risk factors in this region are mainly rainstorms, geological risks, storm surges, seawater intrusion, soil erosion, and earthquakes. The key industrial development zones located in this area were classified into three industry types according to the sensitivity of the industry to different ecological risk factors. Using historical data and hierarchical analytic process as well as weighted ecological risk values, industry susceptibility was determined. We integrated the risk values of each ecological factor with the susceptibility of each industry type to each ecological factor in order to quantify the total risk associated with each key industry zone in the region. The results showed that high ecological risk existed in Liaodong and Laizhou Bay and Tianjin and Dalian seashore.

KEYWORDS:

• ecological risk degree
• ecological susceptibility
• industry types
• geographic information system

Acknowledgments

We thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Funding

This research was supported by the Program of Ecological Impact Assessment on Five Key Industrial Regions from the Environmental Protection Administration of China; the research project (12ZYZ001) from the State Ethnic Affairs Commission of China; and the 111 program (No. 2008-B08044) and 985 project (MUC98504-14, MUC98507-08) from Minzu University of China.