Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Box 17.3
The EU and EIA initiatives
Five years after the mandatory implementation of EC
Directive 85/337, the EC saw fit to undertake its review.
This highlighted a number of problems and difficulties
experienced by member states, which led to the EIA
Amendment Directive 97/11/EC due to be applied by all
member states from March 1999.
The key changes wrought by this Directive are as follows:
competent authority, at the insistence of the UK and
Germany, it still remains open to the developer to
make a decision on this. Formal scoping in public, is,
though, suggested as best practice.
3
Project information provided by the developer
It is
now a requirement that an outline of alternative sites
for the development is provided, together with
reasons for the final choice taking into account the
environmental effects'.
4
Consultation
On the completion of an EIS the
environmental authorities must now be consulted
regarding its content, while details of the request for
consent and information gathered during the EIA
should be made available to the public and time
given for them to respond.
5
Transboundary effects
It is now mandatory that
information from an EIA be made available to
another member state if it is likely to be affected by a
proposed project.
6
Decision making
The competent authority making
the decision about a project must provide the main
reasons for it, together with an account of the
considerations on which the decision is based.
1
Project screening
This has been carried out according
to two schedules. Annex I is a project list that covers
all those types of development for which an EIA is
mandatory. Annex II, however, is a list of development
types that may require an EIA, and here the review
had highlighted disparities in the ways in which
member states had implemented it. Some had used
thresholds and/or criteria (set at high or low levels),
others had used a case-by-case approach, while
some, such as the UK, used a combination of both,
where thresholds/criteria were indicative only. The EC,
therefore, introduced a set of selection criteria that
member states must take into account when deciding
how they determine which Annex II projects shall be
subject to EIA. But to ensure that the most damaging
projects are always subject to an EIA, a number of
categories have been moved to Annex I.
2
Scoping
While the Commission wanted the process to
be a formal one that would entail consultation with the
Source:
Sheate 1997.
CONCLUSION—SELECTED AREAS OF
EIA RESEARCH
relevant outcomes to the user have been
described elsewhere in terms of their applications
to the field of geographical research (Blunden
et
al.
1998). Suffice it to say here that this approach
has been applied to EIA in a handful of
pioneering experiments in North America and
Europe, where they have been used to help
environmental groups at public inquiries and
non-experts to critique EISs that have already
been prepared (Geraghty 1993).
Expert systems in the EIA context can be
adapted to varying EIA assessment regimes and
planning systems and have the advantage that their
knowledge store is easily updated or revised as
circumstances or techniques change. They also
have potential in conjunction with geographical
information systems and, through interface with
ecological or environmental models, to produce
highly sophisticated graphics. However, the use of
expert systems to provide a more flexible and
readily available source of expertise in this rapidly
growing field is wide open to further research
Given the problems that are sometimes evident
in the EIA process, such as a lack of trained staff
to undertake the relevant procedures, an inferior
biophysical/socio-economic database and a less
than adequate public participation, it is clear that
'expert systems' can offer considerable potential
in terms of their resolution. Expert systems
attempt to simulate the means by which a human
expert tackles a real-world problem using a set of
rules, heuristics and inferences programmed into
a computer system. Indeed, as a problem solving
device an expert system interprets information
and reasons towards a conclusion obtaining the
same results that the human expert would arrive
at if presented with a comparable task. The
component parts of the expert system and the
means by which the knowledge base is amassed,
then addressed and driven through the reasoning
process (the neural network) to provide the
