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

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

Ans. The effects of actions that are not accounted for in the normal market transactions need to be considered explicitly in the decision making process on projects. These effects are to be identified, assessed, and evaluated against the economic advantages arising out of a given action. In this context, the environmental impact appraisals are considered the first step in the process because they give an

opportunity to man to consider the effects of his actions on the environment. Economic development is the result of the interaction between natural resources and technology supported by and designed for people. People are the centre for development. Therefore, it is rightly said that all human activity, be it economic, social or anything else is essentially directed at satisfying “needs” and “wants” of man through “altering” and “using” environmental resources.

Types and environmental dimensions of a project

Broadly, there are two types of projects. The first one refers to those projects that produce physical goods like cement, steel, paper, chemicals etc. These projects, in fact, convert the natural resources into saleable and exchangeable products. In fact, these projects inflict a large number of physical changes and disruptions on environment and, hence, disturb the environmental and ecological balance. Environmentaists are mostly concerned with such type of projects. The second type refers to those that produce/render various kinds of services such as health, education, transport, energy, defense, law etc. Such projects also cover actions like land reforms, agricultural extension, services, sales promotion campaigns, etc. Projects of these types are non-physical in nature and they do not directly cause any physical changes in the environment. However, they bring about significant changes of far-reaching consequences on values, attitudes, lifestyles, social relations, and so on. The net effect of such projects is the creation of new wants and needs in society. They ultimately promote consumerism in the society and thereby increase the number of manufacturing projects. Thus, both are

interrelated.Each project has two dimensions:

(a) the intended objectives – they are also called stated goals/benefits; and (b) the unintended consequences. They are also called externalities or social costs which are unplanned, unwanted, and unanticipated. Environmental management or planning is the study of the unintended consequences of a project. Its purpose is to identify, examine, assess,and evaluate the likely and probable impacts of a proposed project on environment and, thereby, to work out the remedial action plans to minimize the

incidence of adverse impacts. It is not anti-development nor is it against the projects. Its goal is development without damage or least damage.

 Stresses on environment

Environmentalists have identified four types of different stresses or pressures that  are being continuously inflicted on environment. They are:

i) Atrophic Stress Refers to the release of various kinds of wastes into the river and other water bodies and their consequent drying.

ii) Exploitative Stress Refers to the exploitation of natural resources endowment for production and consumption purposes through agriculture, industry, extraction, fishing etc. It is important to note that the rate of exploitation has a relevance to the nature’s capacity to reproduce.

iii) Disruptive Stress Refers to the physical alterations in nature resulting from such activities like forest clearance, highways, railways, factory buildings and so on. These physical changes disturb the environmental and ecological balance.

iv) Chemical and Industrial Stress results mainly from the developments in “science and technology” and their applied fields like industry, warfare and agriculture. This comprises mainly the pollutants and effluents of all types, radiation etc. Strategies to face these threats to natural environment through pollution, destruction and over-use can be: (a) preventive or (b) regulatory. It is in this context that the environmental appraisal of projects is gaining significance with a hope of achieving sustainable development in harmony with environment.

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 impact assessment (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.

The impact identification and assessment can be made through several ways.Each one represents a methodology. Besides the one already explained, there are six other different methodologies in the literature based on the way the impacts are identified and assessed. A critical overview of the methodologies is given below

1. Ad Hoc: These methodologies provide a minimum guidance for impact assessment. They merely suggest broad areas of possible impacts (e.g.,impacts on lakes, forests, etc.,) rather than defining specific parameters to be investigated. This is given exogenous to the analyst.

2. Overlays: These methodologies depend upon a set of maps on the environmental characteristics (physical, social, ecological, and aesthetic) of the proposed project’s vicinity. These maps are overlaid to produce a composite characterization of the regional environment. Noting the impacted environmental attributes within the project boundaries then identifies impacts.

3. Checklists: The methodologies present a specific list of environmental attributes to be investigated for possible. They need not necessarily attempt to establish the cause-effect links to project activities. They may or may not include guidelines about how attribute data are to be measured and interpreted.

4. Matrices: These methodologies incorporate a list of project activities with a checklist of potentially impacted environmental attributes. Then, the two lists are related in a matrix form, which identifies the cause-effect relationships between specific activities and impacts. The matrix methodologies may either

specify which actions affect, which attributes, or may simply list the range of project activities and environmental attributes in an open matrix to be completed by the analyst.

5. Network: These methodologies work from a list of project activities to establish cause-condition-effect relationships. It is generally felt that a series of impacts may be triggered by a project action. They define a set of possible networks and allow the user to identify impacts by selecting and tracing out the appropriate project actions.

6. Combination Computer-aided: These methodologies use a combination of matrices, networks, analytical models, and a computer-aided systematic approach. Since this is a combination of difficult methodologies, it is a multiple-objective approach to; (a) identify activities associated with the governmental policies and programmes; (b) identity potential environmental impacts at different levels; (c) provide guidance for abatement and mitigation techniques; (d) provide analytical models to establish cause-effect relationships and to quantitatively determine potential environmental impacts, and (e) provide a methodology and a procedure to utilize this comprehensive information in decision-making.