A two-scale system to identify environmental risk of chemical industry clusters

Abstract

Recent reform policies in China have spurred rapid industrial development. This has led to a large increase in chemical accidents, which may have catastrophic impacts on the local population and environment. As industrial facilities become more complex, it becomes more difficult to control and mitigate the risks associated with chemical accidents. In this study, we propose a two-scale system for assessing the environmental risk level of chemical industry clusters. A series of risk early warning indices for both the plant-specific level and regional clusters level are used in this system. Firstly, at the enterprise scale, a risk early warning index is constructed using inputs such as the presence of hazardous materials, the operation of critical plant equipment and the efficiency of extant management techniques. Secondly, an index for quantifying risks on regional scales depends on environmental, economic, and social conditions as well as the specific enterprises’ components. As an illustration, the system is applied to a case study involving a five-plant chemical industry cluster in Jiangsu province, China. A geographical information system-based methodology is used to obtain a composite index score for each mesh of the five plants. The results prove that the proposed two-scale early warning system can efficiently identify environmental risk and help guide emergency responses at both the enterprise and cluster level.