Research On Cumulative Impact Assessment Of Regional Development

As increasingly more attention is being paid on environmental issues, people's realization to the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is increasing too. Recently, EIA has been extended both in scope and level, Regional Environmental Impact Assessment (REIA) and Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), which are suitable to the sustainable development of society, appeared successively. Though, considering cumulative impact in EIA and focusing research on cumulative impact assessment are novel subjects.Cumulative impacts are the environmental changes or environmental functional losses resulted from temporary and spatial accumulation of environmental impact. Cumulative impact assessment (CIA) is the process of systematically analyzing or evaluating cumulative impact of human actions, and it is an effective tool for preventing cumulative impact. Regional development activities may affect huge, wide range and complicated environmental impact and sometimes due to environmental pollutions. Cumulative impact assessment for regional development activities is very important to comprehensively and systematically understand the features and functions of regional environmental impact.By analyzing research work in China and abroad, the connotation and classification of cumulative impact was cleared. Difficulties and trends were analyzed after reviewing the research of CIA work. A set of CIA research approach for regional development activities was given out. First, researchers should collect present environmental quality data and assess these data. Second, identify cumulative impact by matrix, list and experts' consultation. Then, scientist should determine time-spatial rage of assessment. Come to the conclusions of CIA by comparing impact assessment results of each scenarios and analyzing the CIA result. At last, researchers should give suggestions to prevent or release cumulative impact by consulting experts.An example of two development zones-Jining High-Tech Development Zone which lies to the north of Renceng Economic Development Zone was investigated. By identifying cumulative impact using experts' consultation method, the environmental air, exterior water environment and regional ecological environment have been recognized as more sensitive environmental factors of the research area. Three scenarios were set up based on environmental investigation results and regional plans researchers got. Scenarioâ… is mainly about environmental impact of Renceng Economic Development Zone; scenarioâ…¡is mainly about environmental impact of Jining High-Tech Development Zone; and scenarioâ…¢concluded the cumulative environmental impacts by both.CIA result was got by comparing predictions and assessment results of three scenarios. It should be highly regarded in zone development planning that these very near two zones for sharing limited ambient air capacity, water capacity, and cumulative impact may affect more. Environmental policy designers are easier to get wrong conclusions if they just add environmental impacts of different zones separately. Considering regional development activities usually influence ecological environment, an indicator system also was set up to assess cumulative impact of ecological environment of these three scenarios. Some suggestions for regional development activities were given from the view of cumulative impact.This thesis provides a positive reference for theoretical and methodological research of CIA. Technology approach in this thesis is practical validated by the case study. And scenario analysis method helps identify cumulative impact clearly, after combine with other methods, for example calculating environmental capacity; researches will get a result both qualitative and quantitative.When beginning a cumulative impact assessment research, participators should implement the requirement of special and temporal scales according to the features and environment conditions of the project, using collected environment data, and get a conclusion which could be used in regional plans and environmental governance.