The Use of Performance Criteria in Developing Standard Methods for Land-Use Planning

The assessment and management of risk has been a matter of public and political interest for some decades. The growing industry and the growing number of industrial products and services and the associated transport of goods have presented more and more partly unfamiliar hazards with which industry itself, but also the population and governments have had to cope. The Netherlands is one of the countries that struggled most explicitly with this problem. In the Netherlands risk is controlled by setting quantitative performance standards for the industry and for the spatial planners. These standards are expressed in limiting values for individual and societal risk. The standards are used in the policy 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 re-calculated. Since this is proving increasingly cumbersome for planning agencies, several methods have been developed to determine the effects of new land-use plans on the societal risk. These 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 times and alternative societal risk limits. Using these methods allows decision-making without the necessity of repeating quantified risk analyses for each alternative proposal.