Converting Industry to Environmental Impact Assessment

Abstract

Successive inquiries into the problems associated with population, growth, resources, and environment, have stressed the need for new environmental management policies and techniques. Environmental impact assessment, whose evolution is briefly described in this paper, will be a vital ingredient in any transition to an environmentally sustainable world order.There is a substantial and growing literature on the use of environmental impact assessment methods, although relatively little has been written on the increasing use of such methods by industry in some countries— often without any direct compulsion by Government. A range of examples of the industrial use of environmental impact assessment are reviewed, and the conclusion is drawn that properly designed methods can help industry to meet its own basic objectives of survival, profit, and growth.While there are considerable problems associated with the prediction of ecological and other environmental effects, particularly where the baseline data are inadequate or non-existent, the experience of a growing number of companies and other industrial organizations does suggest that environmental impact assessment is increasingly recognized as an indispensable management tool in those industries which are likely to meet environmental resistance in their development planning operations.