Justice and Environment

EIA & SEA

Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) has become a major tool in European environmental policy in the last 20 years. It rests on the assumption that the gathering of information, before making any decision about activities that could affect environment negatively will improve the environmental sensitivity of decisions. Through EIA, public authorities are presented with environmental information from a range of sources, and have an opportunity to reflect on the impact of their decision; the developer of a particular project produces and receives environmental information, and similarly has an opportunity to reflect upon it. Under the relevant Directive 85/337/EC (EIA Directive), public participation provisions have improved in the recent years.

However, there are serious limitations to assessing the environmental impact of projects only after overall needs and priorities have been determined. EIA takes place at a stage when options for significant change are often limited. Decisions on the site of a project or on the choice of alternatives may already have been taken in the context of plans for a whole sector or geographical area.

Strategic environmental impact assessment (SEA) is designed to fill this gap by requiring assessment of public plans and programmes. Directive 2001/42/EC (SEA Directive) is therefore supposed to be an important step forward in European environmental law.

J&E contributes to implementation of EIA and SEA by using these tools in legal practice (in cases) and comparing the application of EIA and SEA directives in different EU Member States, in order to detect best practices, but also systematic flaws which show how EU legislation should be changed.

In 2006, J&E carried out a legal analysis about transposition of certain aspects of EIA Directive, especially aspects dealing with considerations of alternatives, public participation, trans-boundary assessment and how results of environmental impacts are taken into account in final decisions. This analysis was carried out by J&E for 6 EU Member States: Austria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. For all the 6 Member States, examples of cases were collected and published as J&E case study collection. On basis of the analysis and case studies, J&E developed list of most important problems in implementation of EIA Directive.

As it turned out in 2006 analysis, the problems with plans for big infrastructure projects arise already on strategic level of decision-making. Therefore, in 2007, J&E carried out another comparative legal analysis about transposition of SEA Directive, again focusing to specific aspects such as public participation, consideration of alternatives, trans-boundary assessment and the impact of SEA to the final decision about the plan. This analysis was carried out for 5 EU Member States: Austria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary and Slovenia. For all the MS-s, also examples of cases were collected and published as J&E case study collection. Again, on basis of the analysis and case studies, J&E developed list of most important problems in implementation of the SEA Directive.

Having focused on specific problems in different countries in previous years, in 2008 J&E focused on good practices – in order to find out, whether some of the analyzed countries already has some solutions to the discovered problems. J&E lawyers in 5 EU Member States (Austria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary and Slovenia) have monitored and mapped good examples in their national legislation and practice, in result of which a collection of “Good examples of EIA and SEA regulation and practice in 5 EU countries” was composed.

Currently, J&E members continue using EIA and SEA in their day-to-day practice of legal counseling, education and other activities on national level, in order to improve quality of and collect information about implementation of these tools.

EIA-SEA Good Examples