Environmental Impact Assessment

Abstract

The premises of environmental impact assessment (EIA) lie in the Earth’s limited environmental carrying capacity (Mebratu 1998; Meadows et al. 2005; Rockström et al. 2009; Steffen et al. 2015), the concept of sustainable development (WCED 1987), and the rise of public environmental awareness and concern (Jay et al. 2007). EIA first emerged as a formal process in the 1960s–1970s (Pope et al. 2004; Jay et al. 2007). Common applications of EIA include life cycle assessment (LCA) of product systems (ISO 14040: 2006; ISO 14044: 2006) and legislation-driven assessment of planned projects (Jay et al. 2007; Morgan 2012). EIA can take many forms in terms of the selection of environmental impact categories, impact indicators, and the spatiotemporal scope of impacts. EIA can serve as a preventive tool through which researchers, authorities, or decision-makers can better understand potential environmental impacts or identify current environmental hotspots within operations to improve environmental sustainability. Future EIA developments include quantifying positive environmental impacts (Sala et al. 2013; Dyllick and Rost 2017; Grönman et al. 2019), assessing environmental impacts and sustainability from a holistic, as opposed to reductionist, perspective (Ketola 2010; Laurent et al. 2012; Bjørn and Hauschild 2013), developing understanding about microlevel impacts on macrolevel environmental sustainability (Dyllick and Muff 2016; Ryberg et al. 2018a; Ryberg et al. 2018b; Kühnen et al. 2019), and performing regionalized assessments of environmental impacts within LCA (Mutel et al. 2019).