Regional risk assessment for contaminated sites Part 1: Vulnerability assessment by multicriteria decision analysis

As highlighted in the EU Soil Communication, local contamination is one of the main soil threats and it is often related to present and past industrial activities which left a legacy of a high number of contaminated sites in Europe. These contaminated sites can be harmful to many different receptors according to their sensitivity/susceptibility to contamination, and specific vulnerability evaluations are needed in order to manage this widely spread environmental issue. In this paper a novel comprehensive vulnerability assessment framework to assess regional receptor susceptibility to contaminated site is presented. The developed methodology, which combines multi criteria decision analysis (MCDA) techniques and spatial analysis, can be applied to different receptors recognized as relevant for regional assessment. In order to characterize each receptor, picked parameters significant for the estimation of the vulnerability to contaminated sites have been selected, normalized and aggregated by means of multi criteria decision analysis (MCDA) techniques. The developed MCDA methodology, based on the Choquet integral, allows to include expert judgments for the elicitation of synergic and conflicting effects between involved criteria and is applied to all the geographical objects representing the identified receptors. To test the potential of the vulnerability methodology, it has been applied to a specific case study area in the upper Silesia region of Poland where it proved to be reliable and consistent with the environmental experts' expected results. The vulnerability assessment results indicate that groundwater is the most vulnerable receptor characterized by a wide area with vulnerability scores belonging to the highest vulnerability class. As far as the other receptors are concerned, human health and surface water are characterized by quite homogeneous vulnerability scores falling in the medium–high vulnerability classes, while protected areas resulted to be the less vulnerable receptor with only one protected area falling in the medium vulnerability class. The vulnerability assessment results will support the regional risk assessment for the ranking of potentially contaminated sites at regional scale.

Research highlights
► Assessment of vulnerability to chemical soil contamination is a continuously growing field.
► Vulnerability assessment at regional scale is complex and requires accounting spatial relationships between elements.
► Vulnerability obtained by integrating spatial and non-spatial aspects by means of Multi Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA).
► Case study data, decision makers’ insights and environmental experts’ judgments integrated through Choquet integral.