The Value of Screening in Scoping
The issue of proportionate Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) has been a hot topic for several years now – how do we break the trend of lengthy Environmental Statements (ES) which are difficult to digest?
The purpose of an EIA is to identify the likely significant effects of a project and present these within an ES. However, the key effects are frequently lost in ESs which are hundreds of pages in length and appear to consider every conceivable effect that may occur. These disproportionate ESs are often the result of a risk averse approach taken by those involved in EIA, including co-ordinators, developers and planning authorities. The Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA) have been leading the research on proportionate EIA, publishing the first Proportionate EIA Strategy in 2017. One of the actions identified by IEMA is to improve scoping, encouraging it to be thought of as a core component included within the iterative process of EIA, rather than a single stage undertaken early on in the project and rarely revisited.
