Environmental Impact Assessment Review for a Waste Water Treatment System, in relation to the Water Environment.

ABSTRACT

In order to achieve sustainable development, as many potential impacts of the project implementation as possible should be identified, assessed and mitigated, and the most suitable variant for the development should be chosen. These are the aims of the environmental impact assessment process (EIA), whose particular steps are reflected in the environmental impact statement (EIS). The quality of the process and report is very important for a correct decision on project implementation. Therefore it is important to review environmental impact statements, to disclose the quality of EIS elaborations, to refer to the strengths and weaknesses of EISs, and to improve the quality of EIS elaborations.

Four environmental impact assessments of waste water treatment project implementation in a coastal environment were chosen for review in this study. These reports were elaborated in four different countries: China, Croatia, India, and Sri Lanka with the help of two different organizations. The first three documents are elaborated with help of the World Bank, and the last one from Sri Lanka with support from the Swedish International Development Agency. A detailed description, questionnaire checklist and scoring matrix were applied to review the particular reports in their completeness, transparency and understandability, and to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses in aspects such as project description, environmental description, impact identification & prediction, and impact assessment in relation to the water environment.

The review of the EISs shows that many deficiencies occur in the environmental impact statements within each of the reviewed EIS sections. Only one third of evaluated cross sections of the EIS areas with EIS characteristics appear satisfactory and two thirds are assessed as unsatisfactory. The most satisfactory part is the environmental description, while the impact assessment functions are the weakest area. Most deficiencies occur due to incompleteness in the particular areas, while transparency and understandability are sufficiently provided in almost half of the cases. Because of these inadequacies, a Guide list for environmental impact assessment of waste water treatment projects focusing on the water environment has been compiled. This Guide provides information and may help to improve the usefulness of EIA.

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