Treatment of biodiversity impacts in a sample of US environmental impact statements

Developing and testing a policy environmental assessment checklist for biodiversity conservation

“…They appeared to have overlooked the fact that the checklist sought to evaluate natural resource management policies and their consideration of biodiversity. Natural resource management policy, even in cases where biodiversity conservation is not explicitly identified, does impact on biodiversity (Atkinson et al, 2000). This suggests two possibilities: the checklist was not clear in its objectives, or respondents were unclear regarding how natural resource management policies might impact on biodiversity conservation.…”

Characterizing environmental impact statements for road projects in North Carolina, USA

“…Both broad scales provide little information about the quality of the process or specific data about the documents themselves. Various studies of EISs have pointed to a need for more systematic research of the process and its products (Atkinson et al, 2000;Daini, 2000;Tzoumis and Finegold, 2000). This study provides a quantitative examination of relationships among components of 43 environmental impact statements produced by NCDOT from 1980 to 1999 to find patterns that permit gauging the quality of these studies.…”

“…According to these authors, this procedure is used by ten EPA regional offices throughout the United States. Atkinson et al (2000) develop a simple semiqualitative method to grade a sample of EISs from different federal agencies in the USA and evaluate their treatment of biodiversity. Their method consists of calculating the average of summed grades on 19 aspects of the treatment of biodiversity, as determined by different evaluators.…”

“…Such inconsistency may well be a function of the inconsistent implementation noted by Smythe and Isber (2003). For example, Atkinson et al (2000), studying treatment of biodiversity impacts in a sample of draft EISs, find inconsistencies and inadequacies in the documentation. These authors and others call for more systematic analyses of EISs to identify the patterns and explore possible reasons for these inconsistencies (Daini, 2000).…”

Benchmarking the environmental performance of dairy farming systems

“…Assessing the impact of livestock production on biodiversity loss is complex, as diversity needs to be considered at the level of genetics, species and ecosystem. There is currently no method that can provide a common unit to address the aforementioned three levels, across the production chain and the complexity within each level (Atkinson et al, 2000;Yan et al, 2011).…”