Discuss and illustrate the issues involved in the assessment of environmental feasibility of a project.

Ans. Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) are said to be the instruments through which the environmental management tries to accomplish its objective. The basic premise behind the EIS/EIA is that no one has any right to use the precious environmental resources resulting in greater loss than gain to society. From this, it follows that the aim of EIS is to seek ways by which the project can proceed without any irreparable losses to environment and minimum losses if any, so that the net effect will be a desirable gain.

Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is defined as: “An activity designed to identify, predict, interpret, and communicate information about the impact of an action on man’s health and well-being (including the well-being of ecosystems on which man’s survival depends). In turn, the action is defined to include any engineering project, legislative proposal, policy programme, or operational procedure with environmental implications.” An EIA, therefore, is a study of the probable changes in the various socio-economic and biophysical attributes of the environment, which may result from a proposed action. On the other hand, Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) is defined as: A report, based on studies, disclosing the likely or certain environmental  consequences of a proposed action, thus alerting the decision maker, the public and the government to environmental risks involved; the findings enable better informed decisions to be made, perhaps to reject or defer the proposed action or permit it subject to compliance with specific conditions.

The following are the major issues reported to be encountered commonly while conducing and preparing the EIS/EIA. Some of the issues cannot be resolved. In the absence of better alternatives,

the analyst has to accept the issues as they are.

• Determining the Environmental Impacts This is the central theme in any EIS/EIA. It is a very complex process. At the outset, a distinction has to be made between the environmental impact and the changes in environmental attributes. Our interest is on the “impacts” and not on the ‘changes’, which normally take place even without the project. The determination of environmental impacts involves:

 (a)identification of impacts on environmental attributes or the ER/Vs,

(b)measurement of impacts on attributes, and

(c) aggregation of impacts on attributes to reflect the total impact on environment.

• With and Without the Project the environmental impacts are measurement of attributes with and without the project or activity at a given point in time. However, the changes in the attributes take place over time without the activity. Therefore, the impact must be measured in terms of “net” change in the attribute at a given point in time.

• Identifying the Impacts the number of attributes to be evaluated is practically infinite because any characteristic of the environment is considered an attribute. Therefore, they have to be reduced to

manageable numbers. Thus, duplicative, redundant, difficult to measure, and obscure attributes may be eliminated in favour of those that are more tractable. This implies that some attributes, which are

difficult to measure or conceptualize, may remain to be examined. In this case, bias and subjectivity are likely to be crept in.

• Characteristics of the Base Conditions Prior to the Activity: The nature of the impact is determined by the conditions of the environment existing before the project. The assessment of the characteristics of the base is a critical factor.

• Geographic Characteristics: The same activity produces different impacts on a particular attribute; say water quality, over different geographical areas. The spatial distribution of different activities introduces one of the difficult elements in comparing one activity and its impact with another. This issue becomes particularly critical while making choices between projects.

• Role of Attributes Though the impacts are considered the effects on the definite discrete attributes of the environment, the actual impacts are not correspondingly well categoriesed. Nature does not necessarily respect man’s discrete categories. Rather, the actual impacts may be the effects of varying severity on a variety of interrelated attributes. The issue is one of identifying and assessing the cause-condition effect in order to work out the remedial measures.

• Measurement of Impact Ideally, all impacts must be translatable into common units. However, this not possible because of the difficulty in defining affects in common units (e.g., on income and on water

quality). In addition, the quantification of some impacts may be beyond the state of the art.

• Aggregation Problem After measuring the project impacts on various individual attributes or ER/Vs, one encounters the problem of how to aggregate all impacts (quantitative and qualitative) thus assessed to arrive at a single composite measure to represent the ‘total activity impact’. This would involve expressing the various impact measures in common units, which is very difficult. Some use a weighting procedure to accomplish this, which is again subjective. There is another associated problem of summing up and comparing with the impact of an alternative activity.

• Secondary Impacts Secondary or indirect impacts on environment should also be considered particularly in relation to the infrastructure investments that stimulate or induce secondary effects in the form of associated investments and changed patterns of social and economic activity. Such induced growth brings significant changes in the natural conditions. Similarly, there can also be significant secondary impacts in the biophysical environment.

• Cumulative Impacts Here, cumulation refers to the similar activities spread over in all environmental setting like hotels, beach resorts,surface or underground mines, industrial estates, etc. A single individual activity may produce a negligible effect on environment.However, services of similar activities may produce significant cumulative effects on certain aspects of environment. This raises the question of how to deal with these significant cumulative effects. Therefore, it is suggested to prepare an environmental impactassessment (EIA) on broad programmes rather than on a series of component actions (e.g., industrial estates, mining sector, tourism industry, etc.). On the other hand, alternatively, one can prepare and EIA for a particular geographical area where a series of similar activities are located (e.g., mining areas, coastal line for beach resorts,etc.).

• Reporting Findings The results should be displayed in such a way that it makes easy and clear to comprehend the total impacts of an activity from a brief review. It is suggested to display the impacts on a summary sheet in a matrix form.

The knowledge about the issues as explained above, however complex they are, will be useful in understanding the processes and complexities involved in preparing an EIS/EIA. Such awareness will help improve the understanding of EIS, leading to more objectives, informed and unbiased decision-making on activities/projects.