Multilevel Environmental Impact Analysis - Environmental Impact Analysis: Process and Methods - page 259

6.5 Conclusions
Any of the multilevel environmental impact analysis approaches discussed
in this chapter can be applied to achieve significant efficiency and keep
the analysis focused on the appropriate issues. These approaches have the
advantage of simplifying environmental and project implementation prob-
lem solving by breaking the issues and decisions into pieces of manage-
able size and complexity. They also provide an opportunity to examine
the broader picture without becoming bogged down in the details and
establish a general course of action that maximizes benefits and minimizes
adverse environmental impacts integrated over space, time, and multiple
environmental resources.
There are also a number of potential negative aspects of multilevel envi-
ronmental analysis, with the most common being delaying project imple-
mentation. Particularly, if the process of preparing the follow-up analysis to
a programmatic or first, in a tiered approach, environmental impact evalua-
tion is protracted, the conditions, assumptions, analyses, etc., conducted for
the first document could be outdated. This can force reexamination of the
original analysis, and in a worst case result in a redo of the original docu-
ment with a potentially different outcome. The tendency for the inherently
detail-oriented nature of many environmental professionals, particularly
scientists and engineers, can be another obstacle to successful application of
multilevel environmental analysis. If the environmental team tries to project
and resolve every detail of every potential environmental issue as part of the
most general level of the multilevel environmental analysis, the advantages
of the approach are missed.
There are some measures that can be taken to maximize the benefits and
minimize the potential pitfalls of multilevel environmental analysis:
r Identify which issues are “ripe” for decisions and full environmental
analyses.
r Clearly understand and elucidate which future options are eliminated
and which are left open after each level of the analysis.
r Identify at least the conceptual scope of the following level of analysis
at each step in the process.
r Clearly state the assumptions made at each level and confirm them
in subsequent levels as needed to validate earlier decisions and move
forward with the analysis.
r When a general course of action is identified in a first-level analysis,
provide enough detail to demonstrate that the course of action can
be implemented with the assumed or fewer environmental impacts.
It is not necessary to present every possible action and evaluate all
possible impacts, which is the scope of the next level of analysis.