Socio-economic Factors of Soil Pollution

Analysing the relationship between agricultural production and the natural environment (soil, water and air) and the unfavourable reactions between them became an important question in the second half of the 20th century and nowadays both in Hungary and across Europe. Impairment of the environment is a complex process, it affects all the three basic components of the biosphere (soil, water, air) always at the same time, but the level of the effect is different for each part.Soils are threatened by two basic dangers: the various soil degradation processes (water and wind erosion, acidification, salinisation, physical and biological degradation, unfavourable changes in the humus content and a decrease in the buffer capacity) as well as pollution. In spite of all these, quality, functionality and productivity of soils can be preserved and maintained.Our aim is developing a statistical based information system from the data of the Hungarian Soil Information Monitoring System measured points. We developed a method for estimating element content. To determine the concentration of the elements, we need only the GPS co-ordinates of the place based on the number of nearest neighbouring points. This method does not calculate with spatial circumstances. The other possibility is using the kriging method (spatial interpolation) for estimating more precisely the element content. In this study these two methods are compared.Building our statistical based information system has to determine the number of nearest neighbouring points to be considered in the case of certain elements.We discovered that elements can be ranged only into two groups depending on how many nearest neighbouring diagnostic points were considered to kriging.•3 neighbouring diagnostical points: K, P, Sr•10 neighbouring diagnostical points: Al, B, Ba, Ca, Co, Cr, Cu, Fe, Mg, Mn, Na, Ni, Pb, S, Ti, V, Y, ZnUsing this method the soil pollution locations and elements and its concentration can be determined.The other important question is to investigate the socio-economic factors of these soil pollutions. There are a lot of data in the Eurostat database which can show the socio-economic effect of these pollutions.Based on these data is concluded that usage amount of chemical fertilizer, total population and total grain yield are the three most important socio-economic factors that contribute to soil heavy metal pollution. Enterprise amount, total cultivated area, gross value of farming, forestry, animal husbandry product as well as total freight amount have less impact on soil heavy metals pollution. Last and least impact factors are GDP and value of industry output in rural area.This article shows our research results on the field of socio-economic factors of soil pollution used by statistical analyses, based on the Eurostat database in Hungary and across Europe.