Starting up; early stages - Introduction to Environmental Impact Assessment - page 100

using it for wind power generation: “reasonable” in such a case would be other sites for
sand and gravel extraction, or other scales or processes. Essentially, alternatives should
allow the competent authority to understand why this project, and not some other, is
being proposed in this location and not some other.
On the other hand, from a US context (where EISs are prepared by government
agencies) Steinemann (2001) argues that alternatives that do not meet a narrow definition
of project objectives tend to be too easily rejected, and that alternatives should reflect
social, not just agency, goals. She also suggests that
the current sequence—propose action, define purpose and need, develop
alternatives, then analyze alternatives—needs to be revised. Otherwise the
proposed action can bias the set of alternatives for the analysis. Agencies
should explore more environmentally sound approaches before proposing
an action. Then, agencies should construct a purpose and need statement
that would not summarily exclude less damaging alternatives, nor unduly
favour the proposed action. Agencies should also be careful not to adhere
to a single “problem” and “solution” early on.
Although private developers do not have the wider public remit of agencies, the basic
approach of considering a broader range of alternatives and objectives than they would
do without EIS can apply to private developers as well.
4.5.3 The presentation and comparison of alternatives
The costs of alternatives vary for different groups of people and for different
environmental components. Discussions with local residents, statutory consultees and
special interest groups may rapidly eliminate some alternatives from consideration and
suggest others. However, it is unlikely that one alternative will emerge as being most
acceptable to all the parties concerned. The EIS should distil information about a
reasonable number of realistic alternatives into a format that will facilitate public
discussion and, finally, decision-making. Methods for comparing and presenting
alternatives span the range from simple, non-quantitative descriptions, through increasing
levels of quantification, to a complete translation of all impacts into their monetary
values.
Many of the impact identification methods discussed later in this chapter can also help
to compare alternatives. Overlay maps compare the impacts of various locations in a non-
quantitative manner. Checklists or less complex matrices can also be applied to various
alternatives and compared; this may be the most effective way to present the impacts of
alternatives visually. Some of the other techniques used for impact identification—the
threshold-of-concern checklist, weighted matrix and EES—allow alternatives to be
implicitly compared. They do this by assigning quantitative importance weightings to
environmental components, rating each alternative (quantitatively) according to its
impact on each environmental component, multiplying the ratings by their weightings to
obtain a weighted impact, and aggregating these weighted impacts to obtain a total score
for each alternative. These scores can be compared with each other to identify preferable
alternatives. With the exception of the threshold-of-concern checklist, they do not lend