Standard methods for land-use planning to determine the effects on societal risk

In the Netherlands, the individual risk and the societal risk are used in efforts to reduce the number of people exposed to the effects of an accident. In principle, the societal risk for each new land-use plan should be recalculated. Since this is proving increasingly cumbersome for planning agencies, several methods have been developed for SEVESO establishments and establishments for which in the Netherlands a generic zoning policy is used to determine the effects of new land-use plans on the societal risk. The methods give the uniform population density from a certain distance around the establishment at which the indicative limit for the societal risk is not exceeded. Correction factors are determined for non-uniform population distributions around the establishment, non-continuous residence limes and deviating societal risk limits. Using these methods allows decision-making without the necessity of repeating quantified risk analyses for each alternative proposal. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.