What would environmental impact assessment look like if we started from scratch today? Designing better EIA for developed neoliberal nations

Abstract

After more than five decades of practice, environmental impact assessment (EIA) has failed toconvince sceptics that it represents value for money. It increasingly overlaps with constantlyemerging sustainability requirements. The completed assessments are extremely long, exceedthe cognitive capacities of decision makers to assimilate information, cannot addressmotivated reasoning, and therefore inevitably lead to trade-offs that threaten the very envir-onmental components EIA was designed to protect. In this paper, for the minority of nationswith highly developed existing environmental legislation and management only, we proposethree radical approaches that include: (1) the adoption of 'satisficing', to deliver a streamlinedassessment that is good enough; underpinned by (2) better application of 'acceptable harm-rules' embedded in existing environmental legislation in many jurisdictions to prevent sig-nificant harm to environmental media; and (3) an 'externalities charge' on developers(irrespective of whether EIA is required) to force more aggressive scoping through marketincentives and to fund a shift towards adaptive environmental assessment and managementthat manages environmental outcomes. Better environmental protections could be deliveredusing a far more streamlined EIA process, associated with the creation and maintenance ofmore accurate and comprehensive datasets that can provide better evidence for emergingartificial intelligence tools.