Application Of Habitat Equivalency Analysis(HEA) On The Ecological Damage Assessment Of Oil Spills

The demand for energy is increasing rapidly with the development of economy. The ocean, as the dominant repository of energy in the world, is continually providing a great amount of products and ecological services for human beings. However, the accidents of marine oil spills occur frequently, which not only seriously damage the marine environment, but also cause considerable economic losses. Therefore, to conduct an accurate ecological damage assessment(EDA) of marine oil spills has been attached great importance both domestically and abroad, which could provide a scientific basis for the following compensation. As has not been initialized until earlier the 21 st century, the domestic study of EDA is still in progress. Up to now, the methodologies have not been established, and the contents of the EDA of marine oil spills are not clear and have not been reach an agreement on. Moreover, the EDA of marine oil spills has not been systematically addressed in any legal document, which leads to much lower domestic compensation levels than the average international criteria for ecological damage. As a result, the stakeholders cannot get enough compensation for their loss, which could delay the restoration progress in the damaged marine ecosystem Therefore, the development of the legal system for the compensation in marine oil spill damage is urgently demanded to be accelerated, along with that of the EDA approaches for a scientific and feasible technology system for marine oil spills.Based on the domestic and international research of the EDA of marine oil spills, three assessment approaches currently used for environment damage, including the environment damage assessment, the natural resource damage assessment and the ecological service damage assessment, were compared in this study. Accordingly, apparent defections were indicated in both the environment damage assessment and the ecological service damage assessment, and the habitat equivalent analysis(HEA) was thereby employed in the actual case in the present study. The method’s theory, model, parameters and etc. were introduced in this study, and we changed the boundary conditions of the original model and converted the model of the permanent losses, the permanent service and the new losses. Finally, the improved HEA approach was employed for the ecological damage assessment in an oil spill accident in a domestic mangrove ecosystem, in the condition that the ecosystem had suffered from different restorations. This research was aimed to provide a basis for the damage assignment of oil spill and to promote the research of the assessment of ecological service damage in marine oil spills.