Bridging expert consensus and spatial assessment: Refining the fragility indicator for national environmental planning

Effective environmental governance relies on robust spatial assessment tools to mediate the complex interaction between anthropogenic land-use pressures and ecological preservation. In this context, the Environmental Conservation Value Assessment Map (ECVAM) in South Korea is a national-scale environmental assessment system designed to comprehensively evaluate environmental value for spatial planning, environmental impact assessment, and policy-related decision-making. It employs an indicator-based grading framework in which the final grade is determined using a minimum indicator approach that reflects the most constrained environmental condition. Within this framework, the fragility indicator functions as a proximity-based measure representing areas potentially exposed to anthropogenic land-use pressure. With the increasing reliance on spatial indicators to support environmental planning and assessment, the need to refine distance-based indicators so that they better reflect current land-use dynamics has become increasingly evident. This study aimed to strengthen the conceptual foundation of fragility by examining its relationship with related concepts and by proposing alternative interpretations that enhance clarity and applicability, while also exploring potential improvements to the evaluation method, including revised distance-based criteria incorporating recent land-use patterns. A Delphi-based expert elicitation process was applied to evaluate and select among the proposed conceptual and methodological alternatives. The results indicated that retaining the existing conceptual definition of fragility ensured continuity and interpretability within the assessment framework, while revising the evaluation criteria to reflect contemporary spatial patterns was identified as the most appropriate improvement strategy. The revised criteria were derived from empirically observed urban expansion trends and applied within the existing distance-based structure of the indicator. When applied at the national scale, the improved criteria produced a more differentiated spatial distribution of fragility compared to the existing approach, particularly in areas experiencing recent development pressure, reducing overgeneralization near urban edges and enhancing sensitivity to recent land-use transitions. These findings demonstrate that incorporating observed land-use change trajectories into distance-based indicators provides a practical and transferable approach for improving the relevance and usability of policy-oriented environmental assessment maps.

This work was supported by Korea Environment Industry &Technology Institute (KEITI) through "Climate Change R&D Project for New Climate Regime.", funded by Korea Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment (MCEE) (RS-2022-KE002123).