Environmental Impact Assessment: What It Is and Where It Came From

In one line

Environmental impact assessment is the requirement that a project be studied before it is built, and in India it is a condition of permission to begin.

This is the most heavily examined topic in the paper. Seven of the nine printed papers carry a question on it, in four forms: "What is Environment Impact Assessment (EIA)", "Discuss Environment Impact Assessment", and twice as a short note. Everything that follows in this module is either part of the process or a criticism of it.

The idea

Every other environmental control operates on something that already exists. A consent regulates a discharge from a plant that is running; a standard binds an emission that is happening; an authorisation governs waste that has been generated. All of them accept the project and manage its consequences.

Impact assessment reverses the order. It asks, before the project exists, what its consequences would be, requires that question to be studied and answered in a document, requires the people affected to be heard on it, and makes the permission to begin depend on the answer.

Three consequences follow, and a good answer names all three.

The decision moves to the point where it is cheap to change. A design can be altered on paper for nothing. The same alteration after construction costs the project.

The burden of information shifts to the proponent. It is the applicant who must produce the assessment, not the regulator who must investigate.

And the process creates a record. An assessment report, terms of reference, the proceedings of a public hearing and an appraisal all exist afterwards, which is what makes an environmental clearance reviewable by a tribunal in a way that a discretionary permission is not.

Where it came from

The technique is American. The National Environmental Policy Act 1969 of the United States required federal agencies to prepare a detailed statement of the environmental impact of proposed major federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment. From there it spread through national laws and through the practice of development banks, which began to require assessment as a condition of lending.

In international law it appears in the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development 1992, Principle 17: environmental impact assessment, as a national instrument, shall be undertaken for proposed activities that are likely to have a significant adverse impact on the environment and are subject to a decision of a competent national authority.

In India it came in two stages. Assessment was administrative practice from the late 1970s and became law only on 27 January 1994, by notification S.O. 60(E) under section 3 of the Environment (Protection) Act 1986. That notification was superseded on 14 September 2006 by S.O. 1533(E), the Environmental Impact Assessment Notification 2006, which is the law today.