Environmental Impact Assessment of Transport Infrastructure Projects in Sri Lanka Way Forward

Abstract

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is established for the purpose of managing impactson environment due to development projects and to enhance the environmental quality wherepossible. However recent past incidents concerning several projects have raised the question,“Are we utilising EIA effectively?” Therefore this study was conducted to find the possiblemethods of improving the quality of EIA and enhancing its usage in decision making process.Several past EIA reports in Sri Lanka related to Civil Engineering projects specially transportinfrastructure projects were studied for this purpose and compared with several recent EIAreports from other countries to identify possible improvements.

Identified problems can be categorised in to two, i.e. problems in the established EIAframework and methodologies adopted in the impact assessment. Main problems identified inthe framework are the lack of broad frameworks of environmental and social protection, lackof accountability in EIA process, deficiency of public participation and the absence of properpost development monitoring system. These ambiguities are manipulated by developers asthey see the EIA process only as a rubber stamp to start their projects. Necessary legislatureshould be developed to address these issues and they should also focus on giving a properweight to the results of EIA in the decision process.

The problems identified in the assessment process are the lack of incorporating cumulativeeffects of development projects and sustainability concepts. Analysing impacts should focusmore on concepts of environmental resources and limitations, rather than just focusing on thenarrow impacts of the project. In this regard concept of compensation pools which is widelyused in other countries could be used to address damages done in the development. Further inthe impact assessment the product of magnitude of the impact and the duration of impactshould be taken into account rather than just focusing on the magnitude. Further in addition tothe project based EIA process, Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) can be practicedto overcome the inherent weaknesses of the reactive nature of EIA and to direct developmentin the right direction before taking irreversible decisions.