Environmental Analysis Tools - Environmental Impact Analysis: Process and Methods - page 261

7

Environmental Analysis Tools

7.1 Overview

The preceding chapters identified environmental impact analysis statutory
requirements (Chapters 2 and 3), planning (Chapter 4), content (Chapter 5), and
streamlining (Chapter 6). With the exception of the case study examples pre-
sented in these chapters, they provided little detailed discussion of the tools
available to conduct the technical aspects of the analyses required to predict
and mitigate environmental impacts. This chapter presents some of the tools
that are available to fill in the framework and accomplish the analysis. For many
environmental analysis practitioners with technical backgrounds and a focus
on problem solving, development, and application of such impact analysis,
tools are the most challenging and reward aspects of the entire process. Such
practitioners gain satisfaction because technical expertise developed through
education, training, and experience can be brought to bear on real environmen-
tal problems to develop a solution with a high likelihood of success.
To identify, much less describe, all the impact analysis tools available
or even example tools for each discipline is beyond the scope of this topic
or any single publication. But there are two tools outside the purview of
standard environmental impact analysis methods, originally developed to
evaluate biological resources, which can be very useful for environmen-
tal analysis in cases where ecological resources are the primary areas of
concern. These tools also represent concepts and approaches which, with
imagination and creativity, can be adapted to address impact predic-
tion and mitigation for other resource areas by specialists in their areas
of expertise. The two tools, ecological risk assessment and net environmental
benefit analysis (NEBA), are discussed in this chapter and include real and
hypothetical examples of applying them to environmental impact analysis.

7.2 Ecological Risk Assessment

As the name implies, ecological risk assessment is an analysis tool used to deter-
mine, and to the extent practical, quantify the threat to ecological resources

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