Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is playing an important role in maintaining a balance between developmental process and environment protection. Sustainable growth and developmental process through any proposed project requires various considerations before implementation. One of the most important aspects to be kept in mind before executing any project is it should be environmentally sustainable and socially acceptable. This requires proper planning, designing and execution of the proposed project considering the environmental, social and economic aspects.
Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is an effective management tool for the assessment of environmental concerns in the developmental process to make it sustainable and within the public interest. EIA evaluates the positive and negative aspects of the proposed project on the environment and then decides whether the project is to be executed or not.
According to the definition of The International Association for Impact Assessment (IAIA), environmental impact assessment is "the process of identifying, predicting, evaluating and mitigating the biophysical, social, and other relevant effects of development proposals prior to major decisions being taken and commitments made."
Moreover, EIA do not stick to some pre decided guidelines of environmental outcome but involves the decision makers to describe the environmental values and justify their decision accordingly based on the environmental studies and public welfare and explain the pros and cons of the proposed project on the environment.
Considering the ongoing developmental activities in the field of, government has initiated several policies to make the process more clear in terms of sectoral guidelines, simplification of procedures, involvement of stakeholders through public hearing, regular meetings of Expert Committees etc. to make the developmental process sustainable as well as environment friendly.
Several methods are used for carrying EIA of which some are industry specific and some are generic:
Industrial products: In case of industrial products EIA is conducted by using the Product environmental life cycle analysis (LCA) in order to evaluate the environmental impact. In this process, the emphasis is laid on the technological activities deployed in each stage of production including extraction of raw material and ancillary materials, equipments to the final outcome of the material into a product.
Genetically modified plants: In this case there are some specific methods for EIA such as GMP-RAM, INOVA etc.
Fuzzy Arithmetic: In the process of EIA some specific parameters and variables are needed to be measured in order to estimate the values of impact indicators. Though, it is not possible to measure every property but by getting information from similar EIAs, expert criteria, sensitivity of affected population etc and by using fuzzy arithmetic and approximate reasoning methods can be utilized for measurement. This is called as a fuzzy logic approach.
The final step of EIA I followed by an audit, which evaluates the effectiveness of EIA by comparing the actual impact and the predicted impact.
EIA has emerged as a major tool for environment protection in recent years due to the growing concern of degrading environmental standards. Earlier, obtaining environmental clearance was just an administrative formality but with the growing number of developmental projects and to mitigate their adverse effects on the environment, EIA has been made mandatory for 30 developmental categories in different sectors that includes industry, thermal power, mining, river-valley infrastructure and nuclear power.
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