THE ASPECT OF NATURAL RESOURCES IN ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT STATEMENTS FOR SWEDISH BIOENERGY PLANTS

According to Swedish environmental legislation, an environmental impact assessment (EIA) has to be made when planning energy plants. The EIA has to include the effects of the proposed project on natural resource management; however, a review of the environ-mental impact statements for proposed energy plants reveals that the scope of the assessment seldom includes this aspect. This may be due to several reasons, such as the scope of the legal requirements, which do not include sustainable resource extraction but focus on local issues linked to the energy plant. In order to widen the scope of EIAs to include the management of natural resources, it is suggested that other tools for environmental systems understanding such as life-cycle assessment (LCA) and material flow analysis (MFA) can improve the basis for decision-making by providing ways to map resource flows of proposed projects and by including environmental aspects not connected with the energy plant itself.