Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management

Since the adoption of the EU's first Sustainable Development Strategy in 2001, the European Commission has been committed to undertaking impact assessments of its major policy proposals, covering the potential positive and negative economic, social and environmental effects both inside and outside the European Union. This paper provides as evaluation of a sample of the Commission's recent EC Impact Assessments, focusing on the extent to which the goal of sustainable development has been integrated into the impact assessment analysis.

The benefits of public participation in EA have been clearly described in both theoretical and practical terms. Despite the wealth of benefits ascribed to engaging the public in EA, the design and implementation of specific public participation programs remains contentious. In fact, public participation processes are still frequently criticized as dissatisfying by participants, costly, and time consuming, by proponents, and inefficient by governments. The purpose of this research was, therefore, to establish whether there are points of convergence in opinion among participant, proponent, and government sectors regarding what constitutes appropriate principles and procedures for meaningful public participation. Our approach was qualitative and included consideration of the literature and interviews with Canadian public participation practitioners. Government, proponent and participant respondents identified and agreed on eight key elements, along with sub-components, of meaningful public participation. These elements, as well as those where convergence was not reached, are outlined and discussed.

One of the most interesting paradoxes of the application of nuclear energy in Hungary is that although the building, operation, and even the recent lifetime extension of the Paks nuclear power plant has not faced significant social opposition, attempts for siting radioactive waste disposal facilities have been accompanied by a number of social conflicts. The paper reviews the history of radioactive waste management in Hungary from the 1970s until recently. It is found that since the political transition of 1990, top-down technocratic approaches to facility siting have been replaced by the so-called "market approach", which put a strong emphasis on host community support. Most important elements of the latter approach include public information and the provision of generous financial compensation/incentives for host and neighbouring communities. However, analysis of recent Hungarian siting cases shows the weaknesses of the pure market approach, e.g., the lack of transparency and openness regarding national strategies, the lack of accountability, and the focus on financial incentives rather than sustainable development issues.

Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) needs to develop its own theoretical ground and its related concepts to be able to address the challenges of environmentally improving complex strategic decisions such as policies, plans and programmes (PPP). According to its conceptual specificity, SEA requires an autonomous methodology. Its main feature is that it must be able to dialogue with the decision-making process to ensure the decision related environmental values are duly taken into account. This paper proposes two linked concepts that could help to set up an autonomous conceptual ground for the SEA: The concept of consistency requirements of decisions and the concept of decision related environmental values.

In addition, SEA needs to identify the specific environmental dimension of strategic decisions. The concept of environmental impact describes perfectly the environmental dimension of projects. This paper proposes the concept of the sectorial environmental system as the genuine representation of the strategic environmental dimension of strategic decisions and therefore as the key target for SEA activities.

This paper builds an econometric model that attempts to explain the effect of global trade on the environment from data provided by the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) at Purdue University. We estimated stable parameters for econometric models to forecast the impact of doubling carbon dioxide (2 × CO₂) levels in the atmosphere. Robustness is checked against the Specific Factor Model in trade theory. The overall and zonal predictions for the lower and higher latitudes and the Northern and Southern Hemispheres are compared with the norms. The estimates of the model are also used as inputs into several computable general equilibrium (CGE) models to explore regional welfare impacts by climate change scenarios. The model's prediction comes within range of the norms and therefore, should be an important addition to the stock of pedagogic tools explaining the relationship between trade and the environment.