Selection and integration of environmental impacts in the Danish transport infrastructure assessment process

ABSTRACT

Transport projects have numerous consequences for the environment, society and economy, and thus an EU Directive has stated a number of impacts that need to be assessed prior to any major intervention. This paper is set in a Danish context where the EU requirements have been adopted in the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) regulation along with national requirements. In recent years, however, the EIAs have been criticised for an inconsistent inclusion of impacts and unclear assessment process. A selection of EIAs is for this reason reviewed and compared to the EU Directive and corresponding works in Sweden and the UK to identify potential opportunities for improvements. From the literature study, an overview table with all potential relevant impacts for transport projects is set up to assist the EIA process. For the sake of simplicity and transparency, the impacts selected from this table should, however, be further reduced in number to ensure that only the most important impacts are included in the process. To further increase simplicity and transparency in the EIA process, a novel framework for assessing different types of impacts is proposed. In this framework, a comprehensive decision support tool involving stakeholders is in focus. The framework is supplemented with a procedure for generating objectives and presenting results in an appropriate way to the many stakeholders involved. The impacts overview table and the assessment techniques are applied to a case study to illustrate the process, and finally, conclusions and perspectives for future work within the field are set out.

KEYWORDS:

• Environment Impact Assessment (EIA)
• stakeholder involvement
• multi-criteria decision analysis
• Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)
• transport assessment

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express their gratitude to the Danish Road Directorate for interviews about the Danish EIA process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The Danish government anno 2018 represents the right-wing political spectrum and have at several occasions given indications of this strategy .

2. The total value for each alternative is calculated using the additive value function model.

3. The Swedish Transport Administration (STA), responsible for the long-term planning of the transport system.

4. Based on Morris and Therivel (2001).

5. The SMART model is a tool used to formulate objectives to ensure that these are realistic and ambitious. A SMART objective is: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time defined (Gudmundsson et al. 2015) .

6. Benefit cost rate (BCR) is a socio-economic performance indicator.

7. Noise limits for road (rail) traffic: recreational areas in open land = 53 (59) dB, recreational areas in (or near) urban areas = 58 (64) dB, residential areas = 58 (64) dB, public use = 59 (64) dB, liberal industry = 63 (69) dB.