Environmental Assessments in the EU’s environmental policy

Environmental protection is already mentioned in the preambles of the Treaty on the European Union, with Article 3(3) thereof establishing the sustainable development of Europe and a high level of protection and improvement in the quality of the environment as one of its fundamental aims. Furthermore, in its Title XX (Environment), the Treaty provides more specific rules on its environmental dimension, including the precautionary principle. The proper implementation of environmental assessments is one of the most important tools for putting this principle of EU environmental law into practice.

The most significant difference between the EIA and SEA Directives lies in their scope: while an EIA focuses on a specific project and on the environmental consequences/impacts of that project only, an SEA applies a more general approach when looking at public plans and programmes from a variety of sectors (agriculture, forestry, fisheries, energy, industry, land use planning, etc.)

There are significant synergies between environmental assessments (the EIA/SEA Directives) and substantive elements of EU environmental law (such as the Waste and Water Framework Directives, nature protection legislation, the Industrial Emissions Directive, etc.), as illustrated by the diagramme below.
 

Source: Presentation of the European Commission at the 11th meeting of the Energy Community Environmental Task Force, June 2016

These synergies are sometimes also illustrated by significant overlaps in scope: for instance, the vast majority of industrial installations falling under the scope of the Industrial Emissions Directive (which requires an integrated permit for such installations) have to undergo, in their planning phase, an environmental impact assessment and receive development consent from the competent authority.