Teaching Environmental Impact Assessment

This comprehensive guide provides readers with strategies for teaching Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) in all its forms, whether through formal university programmes or in the form of short courses offered to professionals and practitioners.

This practical, step-by-step introduction to environmental impact assessment examines EIA tools, procedures, and methodology while taking into account both physical and human environments. With its interdisciplinary approach and extensive Canadian case studies, this text exposes students to EIA at work in the real world.

This work has been designed as a primary teaching text in environmental impact assessment (EIA). It focuses on procedural training, with an emphasis on good principles and practice and provides a number of case studies from all over the globe.

This book challenges the prevailing assumption that Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) should be structured around a unitary EIA process. The book begins by identifying, through a scenario, eight recurrent problems in EIA practice. The characteristics of multiple variations of conventional EIA processes, at both the regulatory and applied levels, are then presented. The residual problems that remain after the conventional processes are described and assessed providing the springboard for a description and analysis of eight alternative EIA processes.

A clearly structured overview of a key subject, this work provides the student with not only a complete introductory text but also a book to support further studies. Written by three authors with extensive research and practical experience in Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), the treatment is up to date and brings together currently fragmented information from many sources. EIA is now firmly on the agenda as a result of the introduction of legislation at both national and international levels, and is very much in tune with widespread and growing concern about environmental issues and the impact of development on the environment. First introduced in the USA in the 1970s, the application of EIA has been accelerated in Europe by the 1985 EC directive, which led to its introduction in the UK in 1988, since when it has been a major growth area in planning practice. The originally anticipated 20 environmental impact statements per annum have now grown to well over 300, for projects such as power stations, roads, new settlements, mineral extraction schemes, waste-disposal installations and toursism developments, and this is but the tip of the iceberg. Based on highly successful courses at one of the leading schools of planning, this book should serve the need for an introduction to EIA that goes beyond first principles and is informed by a wealth of teaching, research and practical experience. Students on undergraduate and postgraduate planning programmes should find it useful as a course text, as will students of environmental management/policy, environmental sciences/studies, geography and the built environment. Planners, developers and decision makers in government and business should also welcome the book as a very effective means of getting to grips with a key new subject which they must fully integrate with their other activities.

This comprehensive treatment of environmental impact assessment (EIA) provides an authoritative contemporary review of theory and practice over the past ten years. EIA is viewed as both science and art, reflecting the concern both with technical aspects of appraisal and the effects of EIA on the decision-making process. Adopted in many countries, with different degrees of enthusiasm, since its inception in the early 1970's, EIA is established as a major procedure for assessing the environmental implications of legislation, the implementation of policy and plans and the initiation of development projects. EIA is increasingly an essential part of environmental management