Environmental Management: Principles and practice

Participatory rural appraisal (PRA) approaches seek to enable local people
to share, enhance and assess their knowledge of life and conditions, to plan and to
act. PRA differs from RRA, in that the latter extracts information, whereas the
former shares it and seeks rapport. Multidisciplinary-team studies and a stress on
participatory public involvement also offer possibilities for better conduct of EIA.
However, there has been a tendency to emphasize the strengths of RRA and PRA
and understate the problems which might be encountered. Sometimes ‘rapid’ seems
to refer to the speed of the assessors’ fieldwork, rather than an approach designed to
give useful results fast.
Rapid urban environmental assessment has been reviewed by Leitmann (1993).
Given the tremendous growth of cities, and the misery and environmental damage
this can cause, it is strange that rapid urban environmental assessment has been so
little applied.

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CHAPTER SIX
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Predicting future scenarios
Forecasting and futures evaluation
Forecasting is an essential part of planning, programme and policy formulation. Forms
of forecasting have been used by many peoples from prehistoric times to decide
when, where and what to hunt, where to settle, to make agricultural decisions, embark
on migrations or warfare, etc.
Since roughly the mid-eighteenth century western societies have based
forecasting from rational observation, projection of trends and hindsight knowledge
(Fortlage, 1990:1).
By the 1930s in Europe, the USSR and the USA post- and in-project assessments
of development were being conducted, and cautionary guidebooks, checklists,
procedural manuals and planning regulations (and, in the UK, occasional public
inquiries) were in use to improve decision making (Caldwell, 1989).
The banking, investment and insurance industries had developed hazard and
risk assessment methods by the 1940s, and military tacticians were trying to predict
war scenarios during the Second World War and the Cold War.