Risk-based land use planning around hazardous chemical installations

This paper presents a framework for supporting land use planning decisions around hazardous chemical facilities taking risk into consideration. The proposed methodology contains all the steps that a planner needs to fully define the problem based on multi‐criteria decision analysis (MCDA) and incorporating the needs of major local stakeholders. The decision is supported by the generation of the efficient alternative solutions (land use patterns, LUPs) through the examination of each alternative's consequences. The decision maker can then choose one or more of these solutions observing their results on a GIS environment and overviewing the impact of each alternative. The decision maker (planner) can modify the proposed solution according to personal preferences and thus can judge the effectiveness of each new alternative. The methodology has been applied to a case study dealing with the expansion alternatives of a hazardous chemical facility along with the needs of the nearby community and the overall environmental and social impact.