ABSTRACT

Major projects, such as roads, airports, power stations, waste processing plants, mineral developments and holiday villages, have a life cycle with a number of key stages (see Figure 1.5). The life cycle may cover a very long period (e.g. 50-60 years for the planning, construction, operation and decommissioning of a fossil-fuelled power station). EIA, as it is currently practised in the UK and in many other countries, relates primarily to the period before the decision. At its worst, it is a partial linear exercise related to one site, produced in-house by a developer, without any public participation. There has been a danger of a shortsighted ‘build it and forget it’ approach (Culhane 1993). However, EIA should not stop at the decision. It should be more than an auxiliary to the procedures to obtain a planning permission; rather it should be a means to obtain good environmental management over the life of the project. This means including monitoring and auditing fully into the EIA process. There is a continuing danger that emphasis on pre-decision analysis will keep EIA away from its key goal of environmental protection. EIA should seek to

maximize the potential for continuous improvement. Resources spent on baseline studies and predictions may be rendered of little value unless there is some way of testing the predictions and determining whether mitigation and enhancement measures are appropriately applied (Ahammed and Nixon 2006). It is good to record that there is now more learning from experience and some good progress to note; see for example MorrisonSaunders and Arts (2004) and the special edition of the Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal journal (IAPAY 2005) on EIA Follow-Up.