This is the author’s final version of the work, as accepted for publication
following peer review but without the publisher’s layout or pagination.
The definitive version is available at
http://dx.doi.org/10.1142/S1464333215500064
WHAT IS THE ROLE OF IMPACT ASSESSMENT IN THE LONG TERM?
Alan Bond - University of East Anglia, United Kingdom; North-West University, South Africa, Email
What is the role of Impact Assessment in the long term?
Alan Bond, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, UK; School of Geo and Spatial Sciences, North-West University, South Africa. Email
Key words:
Inter-generational equity
Impact assessment
Cost effectiveness
Sustainable development
Long-term prediction
This short paper makes the case that most impact assessment (IA) has sustainable development as the stated goal, but that it doesn’t deliver sustainable outcomes. A key pillar of sustainable development is equity, both intra-generational (defined after Lamorgese and Geneletti (2013, p.119) as ensuring “equity of opportunity for everyone, particularly the poorest and most vulnerable members of the community and seek to create a good quality of life for everyone”) and inter-generational equity (defined after Gibson et al. (2005, p.235) as favouring “present options and actions that are most likely to preserve or enhance the opportunities and capabilities of future generations to live sustainably”). Notwithstanding the importance of intra-generational equity, this paper focuses on the problem that inter-generational equity presents to IA both because of the prevalence of short-term planning, and because approaches developed to deal with inherent uncertainty associated with impacts considered in the long term are overly resource intensive and therefore impractical. A research focus on IA processes that can deal with inter-generational impacts cost effectively might provide the basis on which to develop an IA tool that actually delivers on its stated goal and fits in with current decision-making norms.
At the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, governments undertook to develop and adopt sustainable development strategies (Cherp et al., 2004). This pursuit of sustainable development has subsequently been reflected as the goal of numerous forms of IA, for example, Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) (Feldmann et al., 2001), Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) (Sadler, 1996) and Sustainability Assessment (SA) (Pope et al., 2004). Yet no claims are made that an IA has delivered sustainable development. In fact the limit of our expectation seems to be that IA might “make a positive overall contribution towards the attainment of ecological and community sustainability” (Gibson et al., 2005, p.91-92), that is – head in the right direction. As the decision-support tool of choice for implementing sustainable development strategies through decision-making, this calls into question the utility of IA in its present form.
The consideration of inter-generational equity remains a weakness in terms of impact prediction at any level of assessment (Bond and Morrison-Saunders, 2011). The fact that assessment processes are constrained by the duration of the project/plan/policy being assessed is inevitable, and helps to avoid considerable uncertainty associated with predicting into the distant future. However, the short timescales that typify IA exacerbate unsustainability in the longer term. As an example, in the European Union, the Habitats Directive and Birds Directive (Council of the European Communities, 1979; Council of the European Communities, 1992) place a conservation duty on countries to protect conservation of natural habitats and wild species of fauna and flora through designation of Special Areas of Conservation (SACs), and the habitats of naturally occurring wild birds through the designation of Special Protection Areas (SPAs). There is also an obligation placed on Member States to identify SACs and SPAs which, together, form the Natura 2000 network. Member States are required to carry out ‘Appropriate Assessments’ of any proposal potentially affecting the integrity of such sites and cannot proceed unless they can demonstrate imperative reasons of overriding public interest (IROPI) – a difficult test to pass (Thérivel, 2009). As a conservation approach, appropriate assessment is a strong ex ante tool – stronger than most other impact assessment processes because permission is unlikely to be granted if impacts cannot be fully mitigated. This is a powerful conservation tool in the short-term, but ignores the long-term consequences of climate change whereby the range of species in the Northern Hemisphere are expected to move north. The consequence of the Habitats Directive and Birds Directive is thus likely to be increasingly artificial management of protected sites to preserve habitats which will cease to be representative of (or viable in) the climate in which they are situated. Whilst just one example, it illustrates how the short-term nature of existing assessments are ill-suited to the longer timescales over which earth systems operate.
“The established approach to impact assessment is baseline-led, whereby the conditions that are likely to prevail in the absence of a proposed initiative are used as the “benchmarks” for determining the significance of impacts” (Hacking and Guthrie, 2006, p.341). The ‘appropriate assessment’ approach is similar in being baseline-led, however, the current ‘benchmarks’ are clearly not sustainable given the “dominant trends of human activities and their effects are towards deeper unsustainability” (Gibson, 2013, p.3), and don’t accommodate inevitable change and system shocks. Learning from the resilience field (after Holling, 1973), it is clear that whilst socio-ecological systems display resilience to change, this is only true up to a point (normally referred to as a tipping point after Lenton and Schellnhuber, 2007) after which a new system configuration materialises. That is, in socio-ecological systems, the baseline is not a stable end point, nor is it necessarily desirable. The continuing trend for making short-term predictions sidesteps the need to consider these longer-term tipping points, and what society should do to manage for their eventuality. In short, when considering longer-term impacts, there is a strong chance that IA will get it wrong and leave us (and future generations in particular) unprepared for the consequences.
As well as the weakness of IA in making long-term predictions given the inherent uncertainty resulting from our lack of detailed understanding of socio-ecological systems, Morrison-Saunders et al. (2014) argue that adaptive follow-up is necessary to deal with inter-generational equity. Others argue for a more vision-based IA approach – incorporating the consideration of scenarios rather than being constrained by a developer’s, or authority’s, preferred proposal (see, for example, Gollagher and Hartz-Karp, 2013). Davoudi (2012) has argued for embedding resilience into planning, and Bond et al. (in press) argue for the inclusion of resilience, adaptive management and participatory modelling in order to deal with the uncertainty inherent in long-term planning for a sustainable future. So solutions exist, but the time and expense involved in running such processes is recognised: the participatory approaches required for equitable visioning are extremely time consuming and costly given the diversity of stakeholders that need to be engaged and subsequent data-heavy analysis (Burgess et al., 2007); modelling processes aimed at better understanding of socio-ecological system behaviour are costly in time and money; and adaptive management is potentially a long-term cost commitment (Walters, 1997). This resource intensive approach to IA necessary for developing a long-term vision, in the context of some arguments that impact assessment is already under threat as powerful agents see it as a barrier to development (see Bond et al., 2014), is currently untenable.
Rein and Schön (1993, p.163) coined the term “cognitive dissonance” where there is a mismatch between beliefs and behaviour; in this context that means that despite a belief that inter-generational equity is important, it is not being considered in IA. What IA needs is a resource-friendly solution to the consideration of long-term impacts, such that outcomes are sustainable and don’t undermine the environment left to future generations. Long and complex IA processes will not be widely adopted given they will be seen as a threat to the development agenda and, therefore, intra-generational equity. So the challenge for researchers is to derive and demonstrate an efficient method for dealing with inter-generational equity. This needs to fulfil each of the following four requirements:
1) Be inclusive and participatory.
2) Consider long-term socio-ecological system scenarios.
3) Accommodate adaptive management.
4) Be equivalent in time and cost to current IA processes.
Solutions exist which can meet any of these requirements individually – but can we meet all of them simultaneously? If the tools can be developed, the next step would be to change the culture of short-term planning. If the tools can’t be developed there is no incentive to change the current culture. Meeting these challenges means that researchers have to engage with practitioners and policy makers; developing tools to meet specific objectives is easy, but developing tools that practitioners will want to use, and policy makers will embrace, is considerably more challenging.
Even more daunting are the epistemological challenges; it is already problematic balancing the competing needs and demands of different cultures within the current generation in relation to intra-generational equity, and given that the “unborn have neither political power nor representatives” (Padilla, 2002, p.70), how can we possibly understand their needs and demands? Such challenges cannot be ignored; they need to be incorporated into these new tools. Some truly interdisciplinary and inclusive research is required.
References
Bond, A, A Morrison-Saunders, J Gunn, J Pope and F Retief (in press), "Managing uncertainty, ambiguity and ignorance in impact assessment by embedding evolutionary resilience, participatory modelling and adaptive management", Journal of Environmental Management. DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2014.12.030
Bond, A, J Pope, A Morrison-Saunders, F Retief and J Gunn (2014), "Impact Assessment: eroding benefits through streamlining?", Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 45, pages 46-53.
Bond, A J and A Morrison-Saunders (2011), "Re-evaluating Sustainability Assessment: aligning the vision and the practice", Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 31(1), pages 1-7.
Burgess, J, A Stirling, J Clark, G Davies, M Eames, K Staley and S Williamson (2007), "Deliberative mapping: a novel analytic-deliberative methodology to support contested science-policy decisions", Public Understanding of Science, 16(3), pages 299-322.
Cherp, A, C George and C Kirkpatrick (2004), "A methodology for assessing national sustainable development strategies", Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 22(6), pages 913-926.
Council of the European Communities (1979), "Council Directive 79/409/EEC of 2 April 1979 on the conservation of wild birds", Official Journal of the European Communities, L103(25/04/1979), pages 1-18.
Council of the European Communities (1992), "Council Directive 92/43/EEC of 21 May 1992 on the conservation of natural habitats and of wild fauna and flora", Official Journal of the European Communities, L206(22/07/1992), pages 7-50.
Davoudi, S (2012), "Resilience: A Bridging Concept or a Dead End?", Planning Theory & Practice, 13(2), pages 299-307.
Feldmann, L, M Vanderhaegen and C Pirotte (2001), "The EU's SEA Directive: status and links to integration and sustainable development", Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 21, pages 203-222.
Gibson, R B (2013), "Chapter 1: Why sustainability assessment?", in A Bond, A Morrison-Saunders and R Howitt (editors), Sustainability Assessment: Pluralism, Practice and Progress (Taylor and Francis, London) pages 3-17.
Gibson, R B, S Hassan, S Holtz, J Tansey and G Whitelaw (2005), Sustainability Assessment: Criteria, Processes and Applications (Earthscan, London).
Gollagher, M and J Hartz-Karp (2013), "The role of deliberative collaborative governance in achieving sustainable cities", Sustainability (Switzerland), 5(6), pages 2343-2366.
Hacking, T and P Guthrie (2006), "Sustainable Development Objectives in Impact Assessment: Why Are They Needed and Where Do They Come From?", Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management, 8(3), pages 341-371.
Holling, C S (1973), "Resilience and stability of ecological systems", Annual Review of Ecological Systems, 4, pages 1-23.
Lamorgese, L and D Geneletti (2013), "Sustainability principles in strategic environmental assessment: A framework for analysis and examples from Italian urban planning", Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 42, pages 116-126.
Lenton, T M and H J Schellnhuber (2007), "Tipping the scales", Nature reports climate change, 1(0712), pages 97-98.
Morrison-Saunders, A, J Pope, A Bond and F Retief (2014), "Towards sustainability assessment follow-up", Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 45, pages 38-45.
Padilla, E (2002), "Intergenerational equity and sustainability", Ecological Economics, 41(1), pages 69-83.
Pope, J, D Annandale and A Morrison-Saunders (2004), "Conceptualising sustainability assessment", Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 24(6), pages 595-616.
Rein, M and D Schön (1993), "Reframing Policy Discourse", in F Fischer and J Forester (editors), The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning (Duke University Press, Durham) pages 145-166.
Sadler, B (1996), International Study of the Effectiveness of Environmental Assessment Final Report - Environmental Assessment in a Changing World: Evaluating Practice to Improve Performance. (Minister of Supply and Services Canada, Ottawa) 248.
Thérivel, R (2009), "Appropriate assessment of plans in England", Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 29(4), pages 261-272.
Walters, C (1997), "Challenges in adaptive management of riparian and coastal ecosystems", Ecology and Society, 1(2).