SYRIADE – Spatial decision support sYstem for RegIonal Assessment of degraded Land
The overall objective of the system is the ranking of potentially contaminated sites for priority of investigation, when no information on characterization and risk by site specific methodologies is available. This way, the system is intended to address not only the requirements of the Soil Thematic Strategy, but also a general and ordinary goal of regional authorities, i.e. to manage their contaminated sites in the most cost-effective way, by concentrating on those areas that could be pose a risk to human health and the environment.
To reach the objective, the system performs a prioritization of contaminated sites based on the environmental risk estimated through a regional risk assessment, and on a socio-economic relevance analysed through indicators of recovery potential. Three main components are identified: the environmental (risk assessment) and the socio-economic (recovery potential), leading towards to the ranking of sites (integrated management).
The three Modules of the system reflect the following components:
- a module for the regional risk assessment (environmental analysis);
- a module for the socio-economic analysis (recovery potential);
- a module for the integrated management and final ranking.
The first Module (Regional Risk Assessment) includes functionalities that allow a first ranking of potentially contaminated sites to be performed, only considering environmental aspects, such as a sites hazard and receptors vulnerability. Additionally for the mining waste sites, the risk of subsidence i.e. the movement of the surface resulting from the collapse of overlying strata into main voids (physical risk) is taken into account using a specific ranking.
The main output of the Regional Risk Assessment Module is a ranking of the potentially contaminated sources or sites based on the potential regional risk score.
The second Module (Socio-economic Assessment) is aimed at providing a score for each administrative unit (or NUT) based on socio-economic indicators such as unemployment, GDP, population density, land use, and infrastructure. A score is assigned to each administrative area.
The third Module (Integrated Management) integrates the outputs of the previous two Modules, in order to provide a prioritization of sites based on the potential environmental regional risk and the socio-economic priorities. The latter Module allows also the definition of integrated management areas, characterized by the combined outcomes of environmental and socio-economic analyses.
The project was funded by the EC Joint Research Centre in Ispra (contract n. 381502 FISC).