ABSTRACT

Strategic environmental assessment (SEA) is a tool aimed at ensuring that the environmental implications of strategic policies and programmes are taken into account and adaptions are made before decisions are taken to adopt them. SEA has a close association with environmental impact assessment (EIA) and to some degree was born out of the limitations of assessing the effects of development projects (see Table 4.2.1)

Decisions that lead to some of the most important environmental effects are taken at a more strategic level. EIA practitioners and others have called for a mechanism by which the environmental effects of policy and planning decisions could be considered prior to their adoption.