[Research progress on index system of regional ecological risk assessment]

Regional ecological risk assessment (RERA) covers the assessments of multiple risk sources, receptors, and endpoints, while the selection of assessment indices is quite complicated, being a hotspot in regional environment management research. Domestic and international researches on RERA revealed that three processes in RERA are of vital, i.e., risk probability assessment measured by risk probability index, status and value assessment of ecosystem at regional scale indicated by ecological index, and vulnerability assessment of each ecosystem in a region under risk measured by vulnerability index. The main problems in the establishment of RERA index system are the strong subjectivity and poor comparability, and thus, the index system should be set up in the three key processes under the principles of objectivity, integration, hierarchy, and comparability. Due to the fact that the status and value assessment of ecosystem is most complicated, the index system should be formulated by compulsory and optional components to increase the comparability of RERA results between regions.