NEW APPROACH TO THE MEASUREMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS:OBJECTIVITY AND REPLICABILITY

Sofia Viegas, Portugal

New Challenges in the European Area:Young Scientist’s 1st International Baku Forum

BAKU CITY, AZERBAIJAN REPUBLIC,  MAY 20 – 25, 2013

Environmental Impact Assessment(EIA) crucial preventive tool in environment policy and spatial

planning best way to promote sustainable growth

important to develop efficient tools

In particulary to quantifying environmental impacts on Biodiversity

Quantifying an impact enables assessing its importance

allows the establishment of effective measures to avoid, minimize and/or compensate for its effects

it is globally accepted that the necessary tools must be objective, accurate and producing scientifically verifiable results

Framework While accepting the need for expeditious and objective methodologies for EIA,

information on how to implement these methodologies is clearly limited

Although there are guidelines to quantify impacts, typically this is not done

At present there is no uniformity of methodologies to assess the impacts, preventing the rigorous and objective comparison between different projects

There is great difficulty in defining such methodologies for biological descriptors (flora and fauna) – given its dynamic nature and the difficulty in parameterizing

Main Goal create a methodology to quantify environmental impacts on

biodiversity

to meet the demands of Portuguese legislation (stemming from European law)

completed with information from several national and international sources that are involved in EIA

Extended research was undertaken in order to improve currently used methods

Results The proposed methodology consists of an algorithm that combines

two components: magnitude (quantity and quality of environmental modified receptor) calculated through indicators that were specifically developed to achieve this goal

incidence (severity of impact)calculated through combining attributes that further describe the impact

ResultsImpact Value (Vi) = Magnitude × Incidence

𝑉𝑡=∑ Vi𝑛total impacts

Sum of the values of the partial impact

Scale of significance

number of impacts

negligible impact

very significant impact

Results An objective, scientifically verifiable and replicable method to quantify

impacts

The end result of this algorithm is a better evaluation of impact

grading it through a scale that characterizes impact in order of significance

allowing the comparison between projects

Discussion Work done focuses on one important issue in Environmental Impact

Assessment :Manage constraints of:

Time Resources Costs Quality Accuracy Feasibility

Ensure the best quality / price /

brevity

Thank you for your attention!Sofia Viegassofia.b.viegas@gmail.com