Research On Environmental Vulnerability In Liaoning Coastal Zone

Coastal zone, which is the most important inhabitation place for human societies, isfacing more and more environmental problems such as sea-level rising, biodiversity decrease,fishery resources degradation, etc, so environmental vulnerability assessment is of greatsignificance for the protection and sustainable development of coastal zone. This paperintends to provide a case study of the Liaoning coastal zone, which is in the mosteconomically developed region of Liaoning Province. As is seen, the coastal areas of acountry used to be the most important habitats for human societies, but now they areconfronting more and more environmental challenges, such as the sea-level rising-up,biodiversity declining, fishery resources degeneration and so on. All this has made urgentlynecessary the sea-water environmental vulnerability assessment and the protection of marineanimals and plants.For the purpose of the marine environmental protection, first of all, we think itnecessary to define the coastal areas vulnerability, and its corresponding attributes, such asobjectivity, sensitivity and limited recovering capacity. Next, we have listed thirty-one factorsinfluencing the sustainable development of our marine environment and the forming of theassessment indicating system, which are based on the four aspects of natural factors andhuman-activity affecting factors, including:(1) the land environmental indictor,(2) the seaenvironmental indictor,(3) the social indictor, and (4) the economic indictor. The informationof such indictors can be extracted in the form of the geographical shape and length of thecoastline, the coastal region area, sea-beach wetland landscape patterns, land-covering changeinformation of the six coastal cities in Liaoning by applying the RS(remote sensing) andGIS(geographic information system) technology.Secondly, the methods of projection pursuit and dynamic analytic hierarchy process havebeen adopted to evaluate the vulnerability of Liaoning’s coastal areas from the spatial andtemporal aspects.The results of our investigation show that:(1) In temporal aspects, Dalian city has been revealing an ever increasing tendency ofenvironmental vulnerability sometimes with fluctuations from1990to2008, thoughsomewhat improved and even tends to be better, while the other five cities in the provincedisplayed a declining tendency of environmental vulnerability, which means the worseningtendency except for Dalian.(2) In spatial aspects, there existed significant differences in the coastal environmentvulnerability of the six cities, Dalian has presented the biggest projecting vulnerability, whichmeans the coastal environment of Dalian is best protected and facing the minimum pressure, while Panjin is exposed to the least projecting vulnerability, which means its coastalenvironment is the worst and facing greatest pressure.Third, we’ve made essential conclusions and corresponding suggestions for thedepartments to refer to.