Describing the Environmental Baseline, Identifying Problems, Links to Other Strategic Actions

The baseline environment needs to be identified in SEA in order to set a basis for the subsequent stages of SEA: impact prediction, evaluation and monitoring. Environmental problems need to be identified so that the evolving strategic action does not make the problems worse, and ideally helps to rectify them. Links to other strategic actions need to be identified to determine the constraints that they pose and possible ways to deal with these constraints.