SCOPE 5 - Environmental Impact Assessment

Summary 

1. Definitions 

An action is used in this text in the sense of any engineering or industrial project, legislative proposal, policy, programme or operational procedure with environmental implications. 

An environmental impact assessment is an activity designed to identify and predict the impact of an action on the biogeophysical environment and on man's health and well-being, and to interpret and communicate information about the impacts. 

2. Operational Procedures 

1. Environmental impact assessments should be an integral part of all planning for major actions, and should be carried out at the same time as engineering, economic, and socio-political assessments. 
2. In order to provide guidelines for environmental impact assessments, national goals and policies should be established which take environmental considerations into account; these goals and policies should be widely promulgated. 
3. The institutional arrangements for the process of environmental impact assessment should be determined and made public. Here it is essential that the roles of the various participants (decision-maker, assessor, proponent, reviewer, other expert advisors, the public, and international bodies) be designated. It is also important that timetables for the impact assessment process be established, so that proposed actions are not held up unduly and the assessor and the reviewer are not so pressed that they undertake only superficial analyses. 
4. An environmental impact assessment should contain the following: 
   

   a description of the proposed action and of alternatives; a prediction of the nature and magnitude of environmental effects (both positive and negative );  an identification of human concerns;  a listing of impact indicators as well as the methods used to determine their scales of magnitude and relative weights; a prediction of the magnitudes of the impact indicators and of the total impact, for the project and for alternatives;  *recommendations for acceptance, remedial action, acceptance of one or more of the alternatives, or rejection;  recommendation for inspection procedures.

5. Environmental impact assessments should include study of all relevant physical, biological, economic, and social factors.
6. At a very early stage in the process of environmental impact assessment, inventories should be prepared of relevant sources of data and of technical expertise. 
7. Environmental impact assessments should include study of alternatives, including that of no action . 
8. Environmental impact assessments. should include a spatial frame of reference much larger than the area encompassed by the action, e.g., larger than the 'factory fence' in the case of an engineering project. 
9. Environmental impact assessments should include both mid-term and long-term predictions of impacts. In the case of engineering projects, for example, the following time-frames should be covered: 
   

   during construction; immediately after completion of the development; two to three decades later

10. Environmental impacts should be assessed as the difference between the future state of the environment if the action took place and the state if no action occurred. 
11. Estimates of both the magnitude and the importance of environmental impacts should be obtained. (Some large effects may not be very important to society, and vice versa.) 
12. Methodologies for impact assessment should be selected which are appropriate to the nature of the action, the data base, and the geographic setting. Approaches which are too complicated or too simple should both be avoided. 
13. The affected parties should be clearly identified, together with the major impacts for each party . 

3. Research 

Research should be encouraged in the following areas: 

1. Post-audit reviews of environmental impact assessments for accuracy and completeness in order that knowledge of assessment methods may be improved. (No systematic post-audit programme has as yet been initiated in any country with experience in impact assessment.) 
2. Study of methods suitable for assessing the environmental effects of social and institutional programmes, and of other activities of the nonconstruction type. 
3. Study of criteria for environmental quality 
4. Study of quantifying value judgements on the relative worth of various components of environmental quality .
5. Development of modelling techniques for impact assessments, with special emphasis on combined physical, biological, socio-economic systems. 
6. Study of sociological effects and impacts. 
7. Study of methods for communicating the results of highly technical assessments to the non-specialist.

*Optional. In some jurisdictions, the environmental impact assessment process may stop short of making recommendations.

Back to Table of Contents

The electronic version of this publication has been prepared at the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai, India.