Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management

In recent years, there have been significant developments in the field of environmental risk assessment and management. Its role in the corporate setting has been strengthened by claims that financial results and corporate reputation can be significantly improved through environmental management. Risk assessment and management provides one of the most comprehensive and cost-effective mechanisms for managing environmental issues and has subsequently led to the adoption of risk-based environmental management. This research examines the current discussion in the field of environmental risk management and undertakes a survey of 112 UK companies to ascertain how environmental risk assessment is perceived and what role it has in environmental management, including environmental reporting and accounting.

The paper concludes that whilst there have been some positive developments in the area, companies, governments and regulators still have work to do in ensuring the adoption of best practice.

This paper examines international best practice with strategic environmental assessment (SEA), which is designed to advance sustainability and overcome weaknesses in environmental impact assessment (EIA). It illustrates how government, business and the community have identified the need for SEA. It explains why there has been a substantial debate regarding the importance of establishing key principles, and why consideration must be given to decision and policy contexts in order to guide future successful development. Methods and procedures are outlined, and SEA practice and potential nationally, regionally and globally is considered with particular regard to World Heritage Areas (WHAs). Conclusions and recommendations are drawn with specific reference to the current and future position of SEA and WHAs in Australian coastal zones.

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.

Current interpretations of strategic environmental assessment (SEA) revolve around two main ideas. Firstly, SEA is seen as a concept for improving decision making through the assessment of environmental and potentially other impacts, not following any prescribed form, thus being flexible and leaving ample space for different interpretation. Secondly, a more rational view is taken and SEA is regarded a systematic instrument for improving decision making through assessment of the environmental and potentially other impacts, following a prescribed set of procedural stages and possibly other methodological aspects. Adopting the argument of the latter idea, this paper suggests that SEA performance criteria are not equally valid for every SEA, but differ for three distinct SEA types; policy-SEA, plan-SEA and programme-SEA. In order to provide empirical evidence, 25 assessments for transport and spatial/land use policies, plans and programmes (PPPs) are evaluated, based on the performance criteria introduced by the International Association for Impact Assessment (IAIA) at the Glasgow meeting in 1999 and endorsed in November 2001.

The scope of this paper is to describe the existing problems with respect to the lack of a harmonised assessment approach for air quality, and to provide general recommendations and priorities for an assessment approach at the European scale. Taken that the approach for assessment may diverge among the European countries and the players involved, recommendations are general and aim at providing the overall framework on the basis of which the formulation of specific assessment approaches could be worked out. The starting point for the paper is a synopsis of the characteristics of air quality assessments, as well as of the drawbacks for a harmonised assessment approach at the European scale. The assessment of air quality is then described in relation to sources as well as to effects. At a final stage the assessment goals are recognised and the link between air quality assessment and integrated assessment is also discussed.