Introduction and principles - Introduction to Environmental Impact Assessment - page 23

relative importance of these effects by the analyst and the public (impacts)”. The debate
continues!
1.6 Current issues in environmental impact assessment
Although EIA now has over 30 years of history in the USA, elsewhere the development
of concepts and practice is more recent. Development is moving apace in many other
countries, including the UK and the other EU Member States. Such progress has not been
without its problems, and a number of the current issues in EIA are highlighted here and
will be discussed more fully in later chapters.
1.6.1 Scope of the assessment
Whereas legislators may seek to limit coverage, best practice may lead to its widening.
For example, project EIA may be mandatory only for a limited set of major projects. In
practice many others have been included. But which projects should have assessments?
In the UK, case law is now building up, but the criteria for the inclusion or exclusion of a
project for EIA are still developing. In a similar vein, there is a case for widening the
dimensions of the environment under consideration to include socio-economic impacts
more fully. The trade-off between the adverse biophysical impacts of a development and
its beneficial socio-economic impacts often constitutes the crucial dilemma for decision-
makers. Coverage can also be widened to include other types of impacts only very
partially covered to date. Distributional impacts would fall into this category. Lichfield
and others are seeking to counter this problem (see Lichfield 1996).
1.6.2 The nature of methods of assessment
As noted in Section 1.2, some of the main steps in the EIA process (e.g. the consideration
of alternatives, monitoring) may be missing from many studies. There may also be
problems with the steps that are included. The prediction of impacts raises various
conceptual and technical problems. The problem of establishing the environmental
baseline position has already been noted. It may also be difficult to establish the
dimensions and development stages of a project clearly. Further conceptual problems
include establishing what would have happened in the relevant environment without a
project, clarifying the complexity of interactions of phenomena, and making trade-offs in
an integrated way (i.e. assessing the trade-offs between economic apples, social oranges
and physical bananas). Other technical problems are the general lack of data and the
tendency to focus on the quantitative, and often single, indicators in some areas. There
may also be delays and discontinuities between cause and effect, and projects and
policies may discontinue. The lack of auditing of predictive techniques limits the
feedback on the effectiveness of methods. Nevertheless, innovative methods are being
developed to predict impacts, ranging from simple checklists and matrices to complex
mathematical models. These methods are not neutral, in the sense that the more complex
they are, the more difficult it becomes for the general public to participate in the EIA
process.