About Environment Impact Assessment

• The United Nations hosted its first Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, 1972 which resulted in the Stockholm Declaration of 1972.
• The declaration emphasizes to lessen air, land, and water pollution and human impact on the environment.
• India enacted laws to control water (1974) and air (1981) pollution soon after.
• India legislated an umbrella act for environmental protection in 1986 only after the Bhopal gas leak disaster in 1984.
• India notified Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) Norms in 1994 under Environmental Protection Act, 1986.
• Environment Impact Assessment or EIA can be defined as the study to predict the effect of a proposed activity/project on the environment.
• Every development project has been required to go through the EIA process for obtaining prior environmental clearance.

EIA Process

• Screening: Determines whether the proposed project requires an EIA
• Scoping: This stage identifies the key issues and impacts that should be further investigated.
• Impact analysis: This stage of EIA identifies and predicts the likely environmental and social impact of the proposed project and evaluates the significance.
• Mitigation: This step in EIA recommends the actions to reduce and avoid the potential adverse environmental consequences of development activities.
• Reporting: This stage presents the result of EIA in a form of a report to the decision-making body and other interested parties.
• Review of EIA: It examines the adequacy and effectiveness of the EIA report and provides the information necessary for decision-making.
• Decision-making: It decides whether the project is rejected, approved or needs further change.
• Post monitoring: This stage comes into play once the project is commissioned. It checks to ensure that the impacts of the project do not exceed the legal standards and implementation of the mitigation measures are in the manner as described in the EIA report.
  

  Shortcomings of EIA Process

  • Several projects with significant environmental impacts are exempted citing lesser investments conditions.
  •  Team formed for conducting EIA studies is lacking the expertise
  •  Public comments are not considered at an early stage
  •  Lack of Quality and Credibility of EIA
  •  Strong political and bureaucratic stronghold on the EIA process

  Modification:

  • The 1994 EIA notification was replaced with a modified draft in 2006 by reducing the number of stages in EIA.
  • Now the government redrafted it again to make the process more transparent and expedient.

What is the issue now?

• Projects in critical forest habitats are being considered or have been given clearance by the Environment Ministry at the cost of ecology.

News in detail:

• Through the lockdown, expert bodies of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) have considered, and in many cases cleared, multiple industrial, mining and infrastructure proposals in critical wildlife habitats, and life and livelihood-sustaining forests. These include the
• • Etalin Hydropower Project in the biodiversity-rich Dibang valley of Arunachal Pradesh; 
  • a coal mine in Assam’s Dehing Patkai Elephant Reserve; 
  • diamond mining in the Panna forested belt; 
  • a coal mine to be operated by Adani Enterprises with a coal-fired power plant in Odisha’s Talabira forests;
  • a limestone mine in the Gir National Park; and
  • a geo-technical investigation in the Sharavathi Lion-Tailed Macaque Sanctuary in Karnataka.

Criticism of Draft Environmental Impact Assessment

Undermining Public participation

• No meaningful public consultation can take place amidst a pandemic and repeated lockdowns.

Undermines environmental protection

• As per the draft, starting a project before obtaining environmental approvals will no longer be a violation, and it can be regularised post-facto. 

Large exemption Category

• Instead of strengthening the EIA process, the notification proposes to exempt a wider range of projects from hearings, including those which authorities can arbitrarily designate as ‘strategic’.
• The draft even allows for a class of projects to secure clearance without putting out any information in the public domain.

Lack of focus on monitoring

• The draft notification says nothing on improving monitoring, and compliance with clearance conditions and safeguards.
• For instance, a horrific gas leak in Visakhapatnam, and a blowout of an oil well in Baghjan incalculable damage was caused to human and non-human lives by violating environmental laws.

More focus on economy than environment

• Safeguarding the environment and front-line communities seems nowhere on the government’s agenda whose priorities are unleashing coal,  green clearances for “seamless economic growth”.

Consequences of the draft EIA would be:

• • Further environmental degradation. 
  • Environmental destruction and development-induced displacement.
  • Further endanger habitats and lives
  • Intensify our vulnerability to infectious diseases and related socio-economic shocks.
  • Effects overwhelmingly borne by Adivasi and other marginalised groups

Why has the 21st century seen multiple epidemics?

• The 21st century has seen multiple lethal epidemics, of which two were serious enough for the World Health Organization to designate as pandemics.
• There has been accelerating destruction of wild habitats, forests and diversified food systems for urbanisation, mining, and industry which means pathogens which were once largely confined to animals and plants in the wild are now better positioned to infect humans.
• The expansion of monoculture cropping and livestock farming systems, coupled with dense human settlements dependent on narrow diets of global commodity crops and meat, are eliminating the biodiversity and distance barriers that lent resilience to the human species.

Conclusion:

This march to unsustainability should be addressed, If not we will remain vulnerable to pandemic outbreaks.