Environmental Management: Principles and practice

Partidário, 1996; Therivel, 1993; Therivel and Partidário, 1996; Horton and Memon,
1997; Project Appraisal 7(3), 1992—special issue on strategic environmental
assessment) (Figures 6.4 and 6.5).
SEA can be applied:
♦
with a sectoral focus (e.g. to waste disposal, drainage and transport programmes;
♦
with a regional focus (e.g. to regional, rural and national plans);
♦
with an indirect focus (e.g. to technology, fiscal policies, justice and
enforcement, sustainable development). SEA can be applied at a higher, earlier,
more strategic tier of decision making than project EIA.
Provision for SEA was made by NEPA in 1970 and in California’s
Environmental Quality Act of 1985, and it is now in use in various countries, including
Canada, The Netherlands, the USA (especially California), Germany and New
Zealand. The Netherlands has had a statutory SEA system in force since 1987 for
waste management, drinking water supply, energy and electricity, and some land use
plans, and its formal requirements were strengthened in 1991 under the National
Environmental Policy Act. New Zealand has had SEA laws since 1991, under Part V
of the Resource Management Act (1995). The EEC and the UK published proposals
for SEA in 1991 (although Therivel et al., 1992:32 note that in the UK poor long-
term strategic planning will probably make the adoption of SEA difficult). Since
1995 the EU has been moving towards requiring member states to adopt SEA
procedures and the World Bank also supports it.
SEA is useful for site selection and by conducting such a ‘higher order’
assessment there may be less need for, and less depth required from, component

---

CHAPTER SIX
122
FIGURE 6.4 A comparison of strategic environmental assessment (SEA) and environmental
impact assessment (EIA)
Note: EIS=environmental impact statement

---

ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT, HAZARD AND RISK MANAGEMENT
123
project EIAs. The SEA approach may cope better with cumulative impacts, assessment
of alternatives and mitigation measures than standard EIA. It is claimed that SEA
can ensure that EIA is initiated at the correct point in the planning cycle and therefore
makes it easier to pursue sustainable development by helping prevent problems that
are difficult to reverse. Increasingly SEA is seen as a key approach for implementing
the concept of sustainable development, because it allows the principle of
sustainability to be carried down from policies to individual projects (Therivel et al.,
1992:22; 126). SEA, at least in principle, can enable countries to work together on
transboundary problems (see earlier discussion of transboundary EIA).
FIGURE 6.5 Stages in links between policy-, plan- and programme-making and strategic
environmental assessment (SEA)
Source: Therival and Partidário (1996: Fig. 1.1)

---

CHAPTER SIX
124
SEA is more demanding of data and expertise than mainstream EIA, but this is
less of a problem if it overcomes many of the limitations of the latter. A difficulty
faced by SEA is that programmes evolve in a subtle way, and at a given moment it
may not be easy to see what actually constitutes a programme. Another problem is
that policy makers may not want to give potential opponents or competitors a
perspective of their strategy, so public involvement is a problem. Methodology is in
need of development. SEA must make accurate assessments in spite of often vague
proposals and policies (compared with the project-level situation), and it must cope
with often uncertain system boundaries; limited information on existing and future
developments; a large number of possible alternatives to consider; the involvement
of a number of, possibly unco-operative, bodies; and possibly more political pressures
than are felt by EIA.