Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Environmental
Impact Assessment (EIA) is the systematic process of identifying
the future consequences of a current or proposed action. EIA is
one of the major instruments integrated with a goal of making
development project environmentally sound and sustainable. EIA
can be described as the process of identifying, predicting, and
evaluating and managing the biophysical, social, and other relevant
effects of development proposals before major decisions are taken
or commitments made for their implementation. A typically institutionalized
EIA is applied primarily to minimize the adverse effects that
large-scale development projects has on natural resources and
ecosystem, and to deliver the development project towards sustainability.
The scope of EIA includes consideration of all potentially significant
effects of a development project - direct, indirect, and cumulative.
The use of EIA began in 1970 in USA and spread rapidly throughout
the world after the UN Earth Summit held in 1992. Implementation
of EIA in developing countries is a new concept Initially the
use of this instrument was the requirement of donors, however,
at the later stage, the national governments also realized that
the development related decisions could be substantially improved
by the consideration of environmental aspects before decisions
were made. To enable such a concept to be taken into account
in decision-making, it was necessary to introduce systematic
procedure of EIA.
Therefore, to date many developing countries of world have:
• provisions for EIA in their national policies
• legislation/regulation/standards/guidelines related
to EIAs
• institutions, government and private sector, for the
implementation of EIAs
• capacity of trained human resources
• funding for EIAs to some extent
An application of EIA in economic development projects accrue
a number of sustainable benefits such as:
• it triggers an institutional building, particularly
with the government, public, private sector agencies and at
the level of the local communities
• it facilitates the public participation in the project
construction and operation
• it provides an effective mechanism for coordination,
environmental integration, negotiations, and feedback
• it provides systematic methods of impact assessment
• it facilitates an application of definite process
An application of EIA is based upon the certain values and
principles for an effective implementation at the project level.
There are following three core values:
• sustainability – the EIA process will result in
environmental safeguards and viability of the project
• integrity – the EIA process will confirm to agreed
standards
• utility – the EIA process will provide balanced,
credible information for decision making
