The contents and scope of environmental impact statements: how do they evolve over time?

Abstract

It can be expected that, over a long time span, both the contents and the scope of environmental impact statements (EISs) will evolve to incorporate new issues and new analytical approaches. A diachronic review was conducted of a sample of EISs produced by one consultancy in Brazil, specializing in mining and quarrying. Nine EISs prepared in the period 1987–2010 were selected, covering different minerals and locations. Content analysis showed that the scope of the EISs has widened and the content has deepened over time, particularly in terms of level of detail and issues dealt with in baseline studies, while impact analysis has evolved to incorporate some quantitative predictions and mitigation measures have become structured along a consistent framework, as compared with a simple list of loose commitments that appeared in the first EISs. Interviews conducted with both regulators and consultants suggest that the main driver of change has been new legislation, followed by better regulation and administrative control exerted by the environmental agencies and improved consultants' capacity, while proponents' policies had little influence on the observed evolution. If EISs are to evolve further in order to incorporate new analytical approaches and become less descriptive, the initiative should come mainly from regulators.

Keywords:

• environmental impact assessment
• EIS quality
• content analysis
• mining
• Brazil

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Research for providing a junior research scholarship for the first author and to the São Paulo State Research Support Foundation for providing a research grant for the second author. We also are thankful to the consultancy's founder and owner, for agreeing to participate and facilitating access to files and documents, as well as to senior staff who participated in the interviews and to the three current and former officials with the State Department of Environmental Impact Assessment, for the interviews and for sharing their views.

Notes

^1. These documents receive different names in different countries. For the sake of clarity, they will be referred to as EISs in this text, irrespective of the denomination they may have in the cited literature.

^2. This paper is not shown in Table 1 because it is a meta-study that reviewed ratings attributed to EISs by government officers.