Introduction
Environmental impact assessment is a procedure that ensures that the environmental implications of decisions are taken into account before the decisions are made.
The first legislation to require an environmental impact assessment was the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969. It directed federal agencies to prepare a detailed statement to accompany each “major federal action significantly affecting the quality of the human environment”. The NEPA had such a significant impact on the environmental policy in and outside the U.S. that countries throughout the world adopted legislation directing preparation of environmental impact assessment and in 1980 the International Association for Impact Assessment (IAIA) was created. The IAIA is a leading global network on best practice in the use of impact assessment for informed decision-making regarding policies, programmes, plans and projects. It has over 1,600 members representing over 120 countries.
Later, in 1985, the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Directive entered into force at European level. During the last few years, the EIA Directive has been amended three times and in 2011 the initial Directive 85/337/EEC and its amendments were codified by Directive 2011/92/EU (Review Process). Under that directive, the authorities make an assessment of the direct and indirect effects of certain public and private projects on humans and the environment before they grant a permit. Such projects concern for example the construction of a dam, a motorway, an airport or a factory.
Following the EIA Directive, in 1996 the initial proposal for the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) Directive was made and then amended in 1999. Finally it resulted in the SEA Directive entering into force in 2001. The main idea of the SEA is that significant environmental effects of certain plans and programmes, such as plans and programmes which are prepared for agriculture, forestry, fisheries, etc., should be identified in advance, at even an earlier stage than the EIA Directive, Article 3 (2) of the SEA Directive. The directive applies to the strategic or planning stages that precede the action project-stage. The SEA’s framework closely follows that of the EIA Directive.
These two legal instruments have one common principle: