Environmental risk assessment approaches for industry park and their applications

Recently, industrial parks have played a vital role for economic development in many countries. Enterprises in industrial park benefit from shared infrastructure, services, energy and resources et al., however the use or storage of large quantities of dangerous substances possess threat to human health and surrounding environment. Hence, the management and control of environmental risk are crucial to industrial parks, especially chemical industrial parks. Up to now, there aren't any specific standard methods or guidelines for industrial park environmental risk assessment (ERA). Various qualitative and quantitative methods have been developed and adopted by researchers in literature. The purpose of this study is to summarize current approaches for industrial park ERA. As the identification of environmental risk source is the first and crucial step affecting the results of ERA significantly, firstly we introduced the approaches for risk sources identification. Then, we classified the risk characterization approaches based on their theories including analytic hierarchy process based method, catastrophe progression method, fuzzy mathematics based methods, environmental risk field based method, etc., and summarized their principles and applications. Through the comparison of the advantages and limitations of these approaches, the future research trend for industrial park ERA is forecasted to help to manage and control environmental risk effectively.