Proportionality has been the watchword in EIA for the last few years.
IEMA’s special report on the state of EIA practice, published in June 2011, identified many of the issues, with the primary cause for disproportionate assessment being the scoping process. At the IEMA masterclass conference on EIA and environmental and social impact assessment in November, I linked the failure to predict significance in assessment to the scoping process.
Scoping should identify the potentially significant impacts of a development and the assessment should focus on these. In reality, too often scoping includes multiple issues that do not result in significant impacts, and with hindsight were never going to.
How do we bring this understanding of a situation to future projects? My suggestion at the conference was that we produce industry evidence plans (IEPs), bringing together historic results from previous EIAs in a sector and review the evidence to determine issues that practice indicates are likely to be significant and others that are not.
Once the information is contained in an IEP, it could be widely consulted on, published as a living document, with future projects and monitoring studies adding to and enhancing it. Future scoping reports could rely on the IEP when designing the scope of projects, using the evidence to reduce the scope of the impact assessment to achieve a more proportionate process.
I will be seeking further views on the development of IEPs at IEMA’s proportionate EIA summit this month.