Environmental impact assessment is an objective analysis of the probable…

Concept

Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is a planning tool that predicts and evaluates, before a project is cleared, the likely effects of that project on the environment. In EIA practice the word environment is used in its comprehensive sense: the non-living surroundings, the living systems that depend on them, and the human communities that live and work there.

Application

The stem asks which class of probable changes an EIA objectively analyses. An EIA study is built around three parallel families of baseline attributes:

• Physical attributes - ambient air quality, surface and ground water, soil, land form, noise levels and micro-climate.

• Biophysical attributes - flora, fauna, habitats and ecosystem processes together with the physical medium that supports them.

• Socio-economic attributes - population, livelihoods, land use, public health, cultural and archaeological sites, and displacement.

The baseline survey, the impact prediction and the environmental management plan each run across all three families, so no single family exhausts the scope. The combined option, all the above, states the scope correctly.

Cross-check

Statutory practice confirms the same scope. Under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 and the EIA Notification issued under it, the Terms of Reference for an EIA report require separate baseline chapters on the physical, ecological and socio-economic environment, and the UNEP EIA Training Resource Manual defines EIA as the assessment of the biophysical, social and other relevant effects of a proposal before a decision is taken. Limiting the analysis to only air, water and soil, or only ecology, or only people, would leave mandatory chapters unwritten.

Result: an EIA analyses probable changes in the physical, biophysical and socio-economic characteristics of the environment taken together.