Assessment Of Sustainability Of Haiyang Port Master Plan Based On Emergy Analysis

The port is a typical region where human activities are in direct conflict with the nature and its sustainable development has become a crucial goal in the coastal countries and regions. The relevant Chinese legislations require the Plan Environmental Impact Assessment, so that the adverse impact can be avoided or minimized in the source. However, due to the defect of assessing the true value of environmental, social and economic resources as well as the close relationship between them objectively and the weak point in prospective assessment of trends, the sustainable evaluation of the port plan urgently need to improve.Based on the above, the Emergy Theory and Method is introduced to the sustainable evaluation of port master plan.Firstly, this paper discusses the basic theories which include the Sustainable Development Theory and Emergy Theory and Methods. Secondly, it summarizes results of various marine eco-economic systems based on emergy analysis, reviews the domestic and foreign research progress of sustainable evaluation of port plan, and investigates the superiority of emergy analysis, leading to the research purpose, significance and technology roadmap. In addition, the natural environment, society, economy and development of Haiyang Port are introduced, providing background information for the follow-up study.Taking Yantai Haiyang Port as the research object, this paper analyzes the emergy input and output of the eco-economic systems in the base year and the recent planning year. Associated with the characteristics of port social and economic development and the marine environment, an evaluation index system is established to inspect the sustainable level, which consists of five categories of factors, named port structure, economic benefit, environmental benefit, social benefit and comprehensive evaluation emergy index. Results show that the recent planning port tends to have a weak structural stability of collection and distribution, low economic benefit output, large energy consumption per unit throughput, an upward trend of the total pollutant discharge, higher environmental loading ratio and average emergy utilization at the spatial scale, which, in general, indicates a poor sustainability. The root causes are:poor exploitation and utilization capacity of the renewable resources from natural system; over-reliance on external purchase emergy, particularly the non-renewable industrial auxiliary energy; the shortage of comprehensive utilization of sewage and solid waste inducing pressure on the surrounding marine environment.For these problems, five development strategies are provided as follows:Energy Saving Strategy, Equipment Saving Strategy, Alternative Energy Source Strategy, Reclaimed Water Reuse Strategy, Structures Cost Control Strategy and Integrated Control Strategy. Under the condition of the same income emergy, the main index changes are calculated to assess the validities, in which the Integrated Control Strategy is the most obvious one to improve the whole sustainable level of port development, and the more control efforts are made, the stronger sustainability becomes.