Environmental Impact Statements Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) are written, multidisciplinary scientific-technical reports whose goal is to predict and evaluate the environmental effects of a proposed project. EIS allows to compare the state of the environment with and without the project in order evaluate the changes that would happen in a certain location if the project was carried out. In such studies often the term environment is used to refer to both the physical-natural system and the social-economic-cultural one.

EIS are decision-making tools to be used by resource managers, land planners and many other elected officials and appointed staff whose mission is to take care of the environment and their elector’s quality of life as well as lead the sustainable development process of nations worldwide.

Since the appearance of the Green Revolution in the 1970s, the ecologist movements and the concepts of conservation and sustainable development as key issues in most parts of the western world, EIS have become one of the most efficient and necessary tools to achieve sustainable development goals, as established by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit), held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

Applying an EIS

EIS come into the scene whenever a new project appears, either if this project has a large scale, for instance the construction of hydroelectric plants or mining projects, or if it has a more punctual scale (construction of buildings, landfills, pulp mill, petrochemical or any other type of industrial plants). When the investor (whether a private company, the State or a single individual) decides to go on a project, in most countries legal framework requires that he first prepares and then presents an EIS to the government planning office as a way of controlling what kind of impacts are going to occur on the environment.

An EIS document’s common structure is composed of the following items: an executive summary, project description and alternatives, legal framework, environmental diagnosis or baseline, environmental impacts, mitigation measures, environmental management plan (emp), closure plan, organizations consulted and References, and conclusions and recommendations.

The executive summary provides a summary of the main results of the study, that is, the major impacts the project would provoke as it is proposed, the mitigation measures proposed by the group that elaborated the EIS, the cost of such measures, and the improvements their implementation would provoke in the environment.

The project description includes all the data relevant to the construction and operation activities, with all investments costs, the workforce involved and the facilities description. The project alternatives are critical: they show the different locations considered for the project, the different technologies evaluated, the different transportation routes considered and the best one selected.

The legal framework must include regulations at all jurisdictional levels related to the impacts the project could provoke. For instance, in a petrochemical plant the EIS must consider the hazardous wastes local regulations and soil and quality regulations.

The environmental baseline must include both the up-to-date description of the socio-economic (economy, employment, education, health, transport, infrastructure, services, housing, poverty) and physical-natural (natural resources, biology, fauna, flora, geology, hydrogeology, air, soil and water quality) aspects of the place where the project will be developed. The idea is having the best description of the area involved in a zero moment, before the project is carried out, so as to evaluate how would the project change such area.

The environmental impacts section must provide a detailed prediction of both positive and negative impacts the project will cause, often being showed in a matrix (the most known models are Leopold’s and Batelle’s ones). Then, mitigation or remediation measures are proposed to diminish the negative impacts. Also measures to encourage positive aspects should be proposed. The EMP includes those measures and also monitoring plans so that the authority can keep a control during the whole lifetime of the project. The closure plan is performed in order to assure that once the project has finished, for instance a mining one, all the facilities used for it will not be abandoned but instead will receive the necessary treatment to avoid pollution of the environment’s resources.

EIS are not reports done on the desk and then delivered. They often require considerable fieldwork for technicians, public consultation with local residents of the area affected to know their points of view and concerns-a process that can last months or years, all depending on the scale of the project and the public disputes that arise. That is because EIS are often very controversial as the conclusion and evaluation of impacts are not “objective,” but rather have a bias toward the interest of one of the parts.

These kinds of studies receive different names worldwide, but they all refer to the same thing and have similar goals. For instance, the United States version is the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), while in England, they are called Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). Moreover, even within the United States there are different names for it; for instance in California, they name it Environmental Impact Report (EIR).

EIS are a legal requirement in many countries before any project is carried out. For instance, in the United States and according to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), whenever the Federal government or any private company takes a “major Federal action significantly affecting the quality of the human environment,” it must first consider the environmental impact in an EIS document. Although EIS are mostly performed by consultation companies, they are also conducted by universities and public research centers, which makes such studies more reliable and accountable for the public as the profit is not the sole engine of their motivation.

Bibliography:

Jacob I Bregman & Kenneth Marsh Mackenthun, Environmental Impact Statements (Lewis Publishers, 1992);
Charles H. Eccleston, Environmental Impact Statements: a Comprehensive Guide to Project and Strategic Planning (John Wiley & Sons, 2000);
Diori L. Kreske, Environmental Impact Statements: a Practical Guide for Agencies, Citizens, and Consultants (John Wiley & Sons, 1996);
Emmett Burris Moore, The Environmental Impact Statement Process and Environmental Law (Battelle Press, 2000);
James A. Roberts, Just What is EIR? (Global Environmental Management Services, 1991);
S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) www.epa.gov (cited April 2006).