Conducting the Environmental Impact Analysis and Assessment - Environmental Impact Analysis: Process and Methods - page 163

5

Conducting the Environmental
Impact Analysis and Assessment

5.1 Environmental Impact Analysis Components

The planning, public input, and compliance with regulations, as dis-
cussed in the preceding four chapters, are all critical to the acceptance,
implementation, and overall success of an environmental impact analysis.
However, all of these activities will bear no fruit without actually conduct-
ing an objective, technically sound, and well documented analysis of the
impacts. The analysis is the detailed and hard work component of the pro-
cess and is analogous to conducting the experiments to test the hypothesis
as part of the scientific method. The analysis applies physical, biological,
and social sciences as well as engineering, and land use planning. These
tools are used in combination with the experience of the environmental
assessment team to understand the implications to each environmental
resource of concern for each of the alternatives, thus helping to predict the
impacts. This understanding and predictions of impacts are the critical
environmental input to decision makers as they select and implement the
proposed action.
There are three primary components of the environmental analysis:
description of the affected environment, prediction of impacts, and
impact mitigation. The first of these, that is, the description of the
affected environment, characterizes the baseline or existing conditions
upon which the proposed action and each alternative will be imposed.
The prediction of impacts is a determination of how the existing condi-
tion of each environmental resource will be changed or impacted by the
implementation of the proposed action and each alternative. The final
step takes advantage of everything learned during the process in order
to mitigate the identified impacts. Each of these analysis components are
discussed in this chapter.

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