ABSTRACT
The initial impetus to develop environmental assessment came from a perceived need to integrate ecological principles and knowledge in political decision-making. However, the law relating to environmental assessment currently fails to reflect the richness and diversity of ecological systems, which have been described so graphically by Ruhl as ‘a mess . . . highly complicated, organised disorder’.2 For example, current environmental assessment law (contained primarily in the EU’s EIA Directive3 or derived from this) contains relatively weak provisions on predicting cumulative and indirect effects, which are hallmarks of the complex and connected nature of relationships between species and habitats and the resilience or otherwise of these. Factors which further work against an ecological approach to environmental assessment include the frequent need to reach a decision on a particular application for development consent. This tends to prevent the use of generous timescales to establish baseline conditions and curtails post-assessment monitoring. Restrictive regulatory timescales also tend to make the ecological success of compensatory mitigation, such as the creation of a wetland area, difficult to evaluate over a long period of time. This means environmental assessment is unlikely to capture fully the creation, or loss, of ecosystems. The drawing of boundaries to establish the physical limits of the area to be subject to environmental assessment more often than not reflects the boundaries of the development site according to its ownership, rather than the contours of ecological features which are likely to extend beyond the limits of the development site and its immediate environs. Finally, environmental assessment methodologies tend to be reductionist in nature, so that species and habitats are looked at in isolation rather than as connected parts of a larger whole.
