Fuzzy Sets and Simulated Environmental Change: Evaluating and Communicating Impact Significance in Environmental Impact Assessment

Abstract

IntroductionSince its inception, the rationale underpinning environmental impact assessment (EIA) has been to provide an analysis of the potential significant environmental effects associated with major development proposals, and to communicate this information to decisionmakers and the wider public. The significance of environmental effects has long been identified as the most critical element of EIA (Duinker and Beanlands, 1986;Sadler, 1996), with impact assessment legislation, guidelines, and Environmental Impact Statements (EISs) making liberalöif somewhat nebulousöuse of the term. There are now over 100 EIA systems in existence worldwide (Wood, 2003) and EIA regulations have been in operation for over fifteen years in the United Kingdom, where around 600 EISs are now produced annually. (1) EIA may therefore be considered to be approaching maturity, and yet in spite of a substantial body of experience, our knowledge of the use and meaning of the central concept of`significance' remains surprisingly rudimentary.Since the foundation of modern EIA in the United States under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, the classic model of normative decisionmaking underpinning the EIA process has centred on the assumption that environmental information will be employed in an instrumentally rational manner. In practice, although appearing to adopt a technical`scientific' approach to appraisal, the evaluation of the significance of environmental effects in EIA is ultimately dependent upon the specific environmental and social context, and is heavily reliant on professional and intuitive judgment and subjective decisions (

Global megatrends and their implications for environmental assessment practice

“…Thus it is a central concept in EA (Lyhne and Kørnøv, 2013). Significance methodology has been examined over the years (e.g., Thompson, 1990;Wood et al, 2007;Wood, 2008) but no consensus exists given the ambiguous nature of the term. The various megatrends may challenge our views of what the thresholds for significance judgement should be given the changing context of the environment (e.g.…”

Fuzzy Analysis for Modeling Regional Delineation and Development: The Case of the Sardinian Mining Geopark

“…While one study has focused on the generation of regions for the purpose of planning (Hall and Arnberg 2002) they concentrate only on the physical geographic characteristics of the landscape. One notable exception used human geographic information as inputs to fuzzy sets (Wood et al. 2007), but their focus was not on regional delineation or development.…”

Progressing quality control in environmental impact assessment beyond legislative compliance: An evaluation of the IEMA EIA Quality Mark certification scheme

“…Determining significance is recognised as the most critical element of EIA (Wood et al, 2007;Ehrlich and Ross, 2015), yet Lawrence (2007, p.731) argues that "little or no effort tends to be made to describe the detailed attributes of the approach or to recognize and respond to the strengths and limitations of the proposed approach". Most significance determination contains elements of technical and more judgemental elements (Ehrlich and Ross, 2015) and the EIA Quality Mark focuses on the transparency and appropriateness of these elements, without expecting consistency across all environmental aspects considered in an EIA (IEMA, 2011).…”