Is SEA worth it? Short-term costs v. long-term benefits of strategic environmental assessment

Key Challenges for Land Use Planning and Its Environmental Assessments in the Abuja City-Region, Nigeria

“…Reasons given by interviewees for this included improving environmental sustainability, creating synergy among relevant stakeholders, making the EIA process achievable, addressing socio-cultural conflicts from policy, planning, and program implementation within the multi-ethnic nation. The opinion of the experts to implement the formal SEA process supports the findings of Therivel and González [36], who show that the benefits of implementing SEA can vastly exceed the costs especially if it leads to environmentally-friendly development of the plans. Our findings show that the challenges facing the impact prediction and evaluation process in the environmental assessment of land use planning, and thus also any potential SEAprocess, include insufficient data availability, lack of relevant tools for analysis, inadequate manpower/dearth of professionals, inadequate funding, and corruption in the system (Table 8).…”

“…Unlike the classical Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process, which focuses on predicting, evaluating, and mitigating the environmental impacts of project actions [26,31,34], the SEA process is used for predicting, evaluating, and mitigating the higher-level environmental impacts of strategic actions, including land use planning [26,31,34,35]. Implementing the SEA process has long-term benefits (e.g., environmentally-friendly development, a smoother planning process, greater plan transparency) that can vastly exceed the short-term cost, especially if it addresses environmental problems to support achieving the environmental goals of plans [36]. In some parts of the world, particularly in the European Union, the SEA process has been implemented since 2001 [37].…”

“…Therefore, environmental assessment and land use planning can be used to improve urban and regional environmental sustainability [1,[3][4][5][6]19,[29][30][31][32][33]. While land use planning focuses on the spatial arrangement of land use, environmental assessment can be used to: reduce the environmental risk of the plan; streamline the project action of the plan; faster plan approval; and better plan implementation [36] that reflects socio-ecological idealism in land use planning. The SEA framework for strategic decision-making, including land use planning strategy is used to describe: environmental baseline and identify alternatives land use plans; prepare scoping reports, predict and evaluate impacts of the alternative land use plans; mitigate the impacts of the chosen alternative land use plan; prepare the SEA report for formal decision, and; monitor the implementation of the chosen alternative land use plan [32].…”

“…Addressing these key challenges may be helpful to improve the environmental sustainability of city-regions, but may not be the answer to all problems, considering the fast rate of urbanization [48][49][50][51] that planning cannot keep up with and the challenges to control such urbanization by local, regional, and national governments. However, the development of the Abuja cityregion from scratch using land use planning strategies [52] makes it the best-case study for investigating land use planning and environmental assessment challenges, considering the long-term benefits of the SEA process that can vastly exceed the short-term cost [36].…”

Assessing the Visualization-Based Decision Support System for Environmental Impact Assessments

“…In addition, in the upper level of the EIA process, SEA (strategic environmental assessment), the usability of visualization presumably could help SEA practitioners and planners in terms of more environmentally friendly development, a smoother planning process, greater plan transparency, and the like [6]. The visualization should bring public involvement of the EIA and SEA to speed up plans, policies, and projects by reducing the environmental impacts and improving the environmental benefits of plans, acting as an instrument of knowledge brokerage, and improve public participation in both levels [7].…”