A method of environment assessment of mineral resources planning for shanxi provinces base on GIS

Abstract

With the rapid development of economy in demand for mineral resources,it is becoming more and more important to coordinate the relationship between mineral exploration and environmental protection. To abate the environmental impact on the mineral exploitation,one of the most important means is to assess the environmental impact of mineral resources planning. The ultimate objective of plan environmental impact assessment is to ensure that assessing conclusions and environmental consequences are combined into strategic decision-making process. Planning environmental impact assessment is the only type of strategic environmental assessment that is required to be conducted in plans by Chinese Environmental Impact Assessment Act. Mineral resources planning have just issued in China,and are still on the exploratory stage. Those studies are mainly focused on improving the evaluation system,exploring the evaluation methods and so on. Quantitative analysis of environmental effects and processing of spatial information are the most difficult procedures which have no generalized evaluation approaches at present. The commonly applicable methods falls into several catalogues in previous studies of environmental impact assessment on mineral resources planning. Analytic hierarchy process( AHP),multiobjective analysis and expert judgment method are often used to select assessment indicators. Those methods can be appliedto identify,forecast,and analyze potential environment impact when mineral resource planning is brought into effect.However,it is difficult to evaluate the impact of the changes of mineral development structure for their deficiencies in processing of the regional spatial information and synthetic analysis of multiple attribute information. The deficient methodologies have become a restriction to the actual impacts evaluation of mineral resources planning.According to the current situation of environment impact assessment for mineral resources planning,this paper proposes the quantitative assessment method for environmental impact of mineral resources planning based on GIS. The present situation of environmental evaluation process in the study area is established firstly,mainly includes: the division of evaluation unit,the establishment of evaluation index and evaluation classification,and the selection of evaluation model.Using the above indicators and models,large scale of quantitative evaluation for the present situation of environment in the study area is presented. Based on the results of the study area mineral resources planning large-scale comprehensive quantitative assessment,the identification and selection of environmental impact factors are introduced,the model and system for environmental assessment is set up in this research. In this paper,taking the environmental assessment of mineral resources planning in Shanxi Province as example,the approach is introduced in detail. Through spatial analysis methods provided by the GIS technology,the environmental impact of mineral resources planning to ecological environment,water environment,geological environment and atmospheric environment are given quantitatively. Based on the results of the environmental assessment of mineral resources planning in Shanxi Province,some valuable suggestions are proposed in this research. The example shows that the GIS are a very efficient and practical method for environmental assessment of mineral resources planning. It cans provide reasonable analysis processes,quantitative and visual results,which makes the environmental assessment more accurate and scientific.