Land-use planning around Seveso sites in the Netherlands: integrating probabilistic and deterministic risk criteria

This paper examines the effect of the Dutch Environmental and Planning Act 2024 on the land-use planning around Seveso sites in the Netherlands, by exploring the integration of the probabilistic and deterministic risk criteria introduced. The study combines regulatory analysis with a GIS-based assessment of all 395 Dutch Seveso establishments and a quantitative evaluation of three representative process-industry installations, covering fire, explosion and toxic dispersion scenarios relevant to major accident hazards. Results show that integrating probabilistic individual risk criteria with deterministic attention areas leads to comparable spatial constraints for fires and explosions, while significantly enlarging land-use restrictions for toxic releases. A comparative application of a hybrid European land-use planning framework (the Italian one) is used as a benchmark to interpret differences in compatibility outcomes. The findings highlight that, while probabilistic and deterministic criteria can be effectively combined, toxic scenarios require particular attention due to their sensitivity to threshold selection and modelling assumptions. Overall, this work analyzed the interface between quantitative risk assessment and land-use planning for Seveso sites, with practical implications for preventing and managing major accidents in densely populated and industrialized regions.