ENVIRONMENTAL APPRAISAL: INFORMATION REQUIREMENTS FOR ASSESSING SUSTAINABILITY
| Type of procedure |
Scope of procedure |
Examples of information required |
Future challenges and opportunities |
| Environmental Appraisal |
Comprehensive overview of emerging social or technological trends
Aimed at ensuring the sustainability of economic and technological developments, and associated decision-making |
Trends in broad category-based or indicator-based measures of the quality status of human health and environmental resources
Supranational observational programmes and predictive modelling of the means by which good quality natural resources can be available to all now and in future
Incorporation of data from above programmes into appropriately scaled "impact" or "change" models that give "natural capital" the same status as other economic resources |
Integration of social, economic and scientific inputs to provide a fully balanced view of the likely consequences of societal choices.
Earth system science needs to make rapid strides in understanding how human activity affects the global environment and how this is manifest at regional and local scales.
New technologies will be developed that are better suited to need, more efficient in resource demands and thus more acceptable to the public's growing environmental awareness. |
| Strategic Assessment |
Intended as a way of ensuring the sustainability of policies, plans and programmes at national and regional scales |
Large-scale and long-term data on rate and magnitude of environmental changes brought about at national, regional and local scales by human activity
Data needs include information on loss of valued species and habitats, constraints on water resources, human health and social consequences, and impacts on other forms of economic activity |
Requires development of framework for operation of assessments consistently across broad range of policies, plans and programmes.
Methods needed for evaluating the integrity of whole ecosystems and interactions between environmental systems (eg land-ocean interplays).
May provide a basis for better co-ordinated policy making and development of programmes that are more sustainable form the outset. |
| Environmental Impact Assessment* |
Introduced as adjunct to planning system to ensure impacts of specific projects were identified and mitigated |
Better access to the available range of site-specific environmental and human health information, and to the predictive models that allow likely impacts (or lack of them) to be assessed.
Key features of habitats need clearer definition and their functional significance quantified (in terms of the services delivered to local communities and regions). The operational limits to local resource use (eg water abstraction) need to be specified to avoid compromising current, land future uses. |
Particular attention needs to be paid to the scoping stages and to gathering appropriately scaled environmental and human health information.
Current practice remains weak in relation to considering interactions between potential impacts on natural resources, conservation issues and neighbouring land-uses (eg could water abstraction affect an important functional aspect of a site designated for conservation or amenity purposes).
Properly done, human health impact assessment could do much to deliver "Health of the Nation" objectives. |
| Site or product licensing for specific processes
(eg Pesticide Regulations, Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control, Control of Major Accidents and Hazards) |
Deals with specific processes or products and their impacts on people and the environment
Aimed at preventing harm to the health of living organisms and the ecosystem on which they depend |
Information needs for IPPC and COMAH are similar to those needed under EIA, save that the risk assessment procedure is often more formalised and focussed on a single chemical
Social, spatial and temporal aspects of risk assessments more important but methods in infancy. Better use required of existing knowledge on toxicity and environmental behaviour of chemicals |
Links between sources of contaminants and their environmental fate and biological impacts are weak leading to regulatory efforts incorporating major uncertainties that undermine confidence.
Risk assessment procedures are too non-specific and there is an over-reliance on default values instead of real-world measurement and monitoring coupled with validated exposure models; improvements in this area are vital if the benefits of new technologies and chemicals are to contribute to achieving sustainability. |
* This includes a number of sub-sets such as Health Impact Assessment (for people), and Ecological Impact Assessment (for wildlife and for those services delivered by the environment via natural resources)
