Potential environmental problems resulted from contaminated farmland and solution for land consolidation in China

Abstract: Along with economy growing, industrialization and urbanization, farmland pollution has become one of serious environmental problems in China. According to the data from the report on the national general survey on soil contamination, in some regions of China, the soil pollution is still worthy of consideration, the environmental quality of farmland is undoubtedly alarming, and soil pollution problem of industrial and mining derelict land is grave. Appling the existing land consolidation technology to contaminated farmland, will inevitably bring a certain impact on the atmosphere, water, and soil environmental quality. In this paper, based on the analysis of the features of existing land consolidation technology in China, we find that different from the principle of foreign land consolidation technology, repair first before consolidation, application of our existing land consolidation technology will cause many environmental problems, such as increasing the pollution area, complicating the pollution type, and diversify the pollution ways. The effect way to resolve the above problems is to reconstruct the farmland consolidation technology which should take the consideration of the common ground of land remediation and land consolidation. We emphasize that the proposed technical system is only applicable to mild and light pollution of farmland consolidation. For moderate and severe pollution of farmland, it should repair first before consolidation. The existing land consolidation operation procedure in China has 4 phases, and in this paper we have put forward some improvement suggestions for each phase. Firstly, before the implementation of land consolidation project, we hold the opinion that investigation of pollution state should be added into the existing preparation and object area determination phase. Through the investigation of the data of natural, social-economy conditions, pollution state, pollutant source, and so on, we can identify whether the farmland is polluted or not, and the pollution type and degree, which can provide the foundation knowledge for consolidation engineering design. Secondly, in the concerned procedure of the project planning design phase, we add an extra procedure of scheme comparison. According to the analysis of technical and economic feasibility, preliminary screening of proposed scheme can be realized; and then through scenario analysis and effect evaluation, an optimized scheme can be proposed; eventually, combined with local economic and social development goals, the final land consolidation scheme can be determined to realize the benefit of economic, social and environment. Thirdly, we put forward that except the existing procedure of approval and implementation phase, after the implementation of consolidate project, monitoring of air and water pollution should be carried out to check the effect of the scheme and consolidation technology. At the last phase of check and confirmation, we notice that soil environmental quality assessment should be added into this phase to strengthen the evaluation and management of post-consolidation, and hence to realize the coordination of the relationship between land and humankind, the improvement of the efficiency of land use, the protection of the ecological environment, the promotion of sustainable utilization of land resources and the sustainable development of social economy. This paper will provide the scientific thinking and technical framework for mildly and lightly polluted land consolidation in China.