Monitoring and auditing: after the decision - Introduction to Environmental Impact Assessment - page 203

Project modifications
Post-EIS project modifications invalidate many predictions.
Monitoring data
Monitoring data and techniques often prove inadequate for auditing purposes.
Pre-development baseline monitoring is often insufficient, if undertaken at all.
Most monitoring data are collected and provided by the project proponent, which may give rise to
fears of possible bias in the provision of information.
Comprehensiveness
Many auditing studies are concerned only with certain types of impacts (e.g. biophysical but not
socio-economic; operational but not construction-stage impacts) and are therefore not full-project
EIA audits.
Clarity
Few published auditing studies are explicit about the criteria used to establish prediction accuracy;
this lack of clarity hampers comparisons between different studies.
Interpretation
Most auditing studies pay little attention to examining the underlying causes of predictive errors:
this needs to be addressed if monitoring and auditing work is to provide an effective feedback in
the EIA process.
( Source: Chadwick & Glasson 1999.)
in Garrow Lake, Canada's most northerly hypersaline lake. Such outcomes are not unique
to Canada. Canada is a leader in monitoring, and the incidence of such research may
result in improved and better predictions than in most countries.
Findings from the early limited auditing activity in the UK were not too encouraging.
A study of four major developments—the Sullom Voe (Shetlands) and Flotta (Orkneys)
oil terminals, the Cow Green reservoir and the Redcar steelworks—suggested that 88 per
cent of the predictions were not auditable. Of those that were auditable, fewer than half
were accurate (Bisset 1984). Mills's (1992) monitoring study of the visual impacts of five
recent UK major project developments (a trunk road, two wind farms, a power station
and an opencast coal mine) revealed that there were often significant differences between
what was stated in an EIS and what actually happened. Project descriptions changed
fundamentally in some cases, landscape descriptions were restricted to land immediately
surrounding the site and aesthetic considerations were often omitted. However, mitigation
measures were generally carried out well
More recent examples of auditing include the Toyota plant study (Ecotech Research
and Consulting Ltd 1994), and various wind farm studies (Blandford, C. Associates 1994,
ETSU 1994). The Toyota study took a wide perspective on environmental impacts;
auditing revealed some underestimation of the impacts of employment and emissions,
some overestimation of housing impacts and a reasonable identification of the impacts of
construction traffic. The study by Blandford, C. Associates of the construction stage of
three wind farms in Wales confirmed the predictions of low ecological impacts, but
suggested that the visual impacts were greater than predicted, with visibility distance