A review on methodologies adopted during environmental impact assessment of development projects

Abstract

Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) is one of the proven anticipatory and legislative tool used to predict the environmental consequences of any development project. It is a decision making tool used to anticipate and quantify the positive and negative impact of a proposed development project on environment consisting of a social, economic and biophysical aspects. The purpose of the assessment to assist decision makers in considering the environmental impacts of proposed project when deciding whether to proceed with a project. Numerous EIA methodologies have been developed such as Interaction Matrices, Network, Checklist, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Rapid Impact Assessment Matrix (RIAM) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Although, there are number of studies on EIA methodologies to identify their strength and weakness, the adequacy of impact assessment methodologies was evaluated in terms of specific criteria like impact identification, impact communication and impact interpretation. A review on these EIA methodologies and their adoption has been presented in the current study. The aim of this review paper is to find out that, which method we can use to assess the environmental assessment of highway road expansion in mountainous regions.