Heavy Metal in Urban Soil: Health Risk Assessment and Management

With the rapid development of industrialization and urbanization in the developing country, quite a few pollutants produced by anthropological activities enter into urban soil. A large area of urban soil was polluted by different kinds of pollutants. There have been many pollution events like itai-itai disease in the whole world, and many people suffered from urban soil pollution. As the place where people are highly concentrated, urban soil has a great deal with human health. Research has shown that the current soil environmental management and control system may be unable to adapt to changes of the current complex environment. In order to protect urban residents' health, the scientific and reasonable environmental health risk assessment and management system of environmental pollutants in urban soil have strong scientific, realistic, and strategic significances. Soil pollution including its characteristics, resources, and pollutant types were introduced. The definition of urban soil, current situation of urban soil pollutant, and assessment methods of urban soil were also introduced. Also, this chapter introduces main contents of health risk assessment and management on heavy metals in urban soil, and pointed out existing issues and possible research directions in this field, with the aim of offering references.