Assessment of Environmental Severity Around the Mining Region Using GIS-Based AHP Model: A Case Study of the Dongri Buzurg Manganese Ore Mine, India

Mining activities have always been responsible for altering the characteristics of the natural environment and leading to an imbalance in the ecosystem around the mining regions. The major negative environmental consequences of mining are air pollution, water pollution, soil degradation, loss of forest vegetation, health problems with human habitats, impact on wildlife, changes in regional climate, etc. Thus, an assessment of environmental vulnerability in the mining region is necessary to measure environmental performance. The assessment of environmental severity around the mining area can be an important indicator for monitoring the impacts of mining. In this paper, environmental severity index is derived by applying analytic hierarchy process. This paper presents a comprehensive approach to assessing environmental severity using an integrated approach (geographical information system and analytic hierarchy process). In this paper, a composite environmental severity of the landscape for the Dongri Buzurg manganese ore mine, a part of Maharashtra state, in central India, is derived. A 5-km radius around the mine's center is the area under study. In this instance, nine variables were taken into account for the above-stated AHP calculation. Nine variables are ambient air, water and noise quality parameters and also land use and land cover (LULC), vegetation health, topography, average annual rainfall, and horizontal (peripheral) distance from the mine. The environmental severity was derived by spatial data (pixel by pixel) using spatial AHP inputs. A scale of five categories, on the basis of, relative importance are developed. Relative weighted value is multiplied by each subclass ranking value of the factors to produce an environmental severity map. The derived environmental severity map was categorized into four zones: low to very high. Almost 29