Abstract
With China’s government facilitating railway projects, more railway lines inevitably pass through ecological fragile regions (EFRs). Railway construction activities in EFRs might cause detrimental impacts on the local water-soil environment (WSE), which is the basis of the local ecological system that if destroyed can induce secondary disasters. Studies on the WSE risk (WSER) during railway construction in EFRs are limited. As such, this study aims to offer preliminary insight into the WSER assessment of railway construction in EFRs. WSERs were identified firstly based on the literature review and field surveys, and thus a risk index framework for WSER assessment including 5 categories of WSERs and 16 second-order risks was established. Then a comprehensive quantitative assessment method was developed by integrating analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and matter-element analysis (MEA) to assess the overall WSERs of railway construction in EFRs. A case (i.e., the Mingan subproject of Hefei-Fuzhou railway) was selected to demonstrate and validate the developed approach. Results show that the proposed assessment approach can be applied to evaluate the WSERs during railway construction. In addition, the case study demonstrates that the risk of construction methods should be the key focus. Findings from this study enrich the knowledge body of sustainable railways and guide the project managers to conduct practical WSER assessment of railway construction.
Highlights
Since the successful delivery of the first high-speed railway (HSR), i.e., Beijing-Tianjin Intercity Railway in 2008, China’s HSR has entered into a new stage of comprehensive and rapid development
The rating of the WSE risk (WSER) of MG subproject is III, which indicates the overall WSER is situated in a feasible but reduction-needed zone, which indicates the detrimental impacts on local water-soil environment (WSE) caused by the WSERs can be controlled, and some specific measures can be taken based on the risk rating
This paper proposed a novel approach for WSER assessment of railway project construction in the ecological fragile regions (EFRs)
Summary
Since the successful delivery of the first high-speed railway (HSR), i.e., Beijing-Tianjin Intercity Railway in 2008, China’s HSR has entered into a new stage of comprehensive and rapid development. From the statistics of MEE [8], EFRs in China could be mainly divided into eight parts: (1) Water-land EFR along the coast; (2) agro-pastoral EFR in the north; (3) forest-steppe EFR in the northeast; (4) oasis-desert EFR in the northwest; (5) mountain-agro-pastoral EFR in the southwestern mountains; (6) karst-mountain EFR in the southwest; (7) compound-eroding EFR in the Tibet; and (8) red-soil hill-mountain EFR in the south. This means some railway lines have to cross the EFRs to establish the national railway networks. It is necessary to take measures in advance to minimize the detrimental impacts of construction activities on the local WSE; a comprehensive assessment of the water-soil environmental risks (WSERs) during railway construction is the precondition of designing appropriate management strategies
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