ABSTRACT

The importance of adopting a resilience perspective in the context of formal Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) has also been highlighted in the literature, both in terms of project-level and strategic-level EIAs. Although the establishment of formal EIA processes and the development of landscape ecology occurred virtually concurrently, the emerging concepts and techniques of landscape ecology had not yet found major application in mainstream EIA practice. In authors view project-level EIA has the potential to become an important tool for addressing issues of global climate change, both in terms of mitigation and adaptation. One potential reason for an imperfect fit, however, is the notion that EIA is driven by stakeholder-relevant valued ecosystem components (VECs) that are normally identified on the basis of traditional elements of ecosystems. The ultimate aim of making human developments more sustainable demands the protection of important ecological values, embodied in EIA by the concept of the VEC.