What is Scoping
An early component of the environmental assessment to determine what elements of the project to assess, and what environmental components are likely to be affected so we can focus on these. [determine the important issues that need to be assessed]
Scoping thus serves a number of important functions in the EA process (there are 6):
- ensuring early input from those affected [from potential stakeholders] by development;
- identifying public and scientific concerns and values;
- focusing the assessment and providing a coherent view of the issues;
- ensuring that key issues are identified and given an appropriate degree of attention;
- reducing the volume of unnecessarily comprehensive data and information;
- defining the spatial, temporal, and other boundaries and limits of the assessment; and
- ensuring that the EA is designed to maximize information quality for decision-making purposes.
Environmental baseline studies
to determine the past, present, and possible future state of the environment without the proposed project or activity
Baseline assessments in EA are comprised of three main parts:
- identifying and selecting the valued components (VCs) for inclusion in the assessment;
- establishing the spatial and temporal boundaries for the assessment; and
- assessing the condition of, and changes or trends in, VCs.
Valued components
Components or attributes of the human and physical environment that are considered important or highly valued and therefore require evaluation within environmental assessment.
Environmental Change
How the condition of an environmental or socio-economic parameter is altered, usually measurable, over a specified period.
Typically defined in terms of a process, [ex. soil erosion] that is set in motion by project actions, other actions, or natural processes.
Actions such as road construction or dam construction create environmental change.
Environmental Effect
The change difference
The difference in the condition of an environmental parameter under project-induced change versus what that condition might be in the absence of project-induced change.
The term “environmental effect” is often used interchangeably with:
Environmental impact
Some argue that environmental impacts are ________ or _________ of the value that _______ places on certain environmental effects. Some consider this distinction little more than semantics. In this book, environmental “effect” and “impacts” are treated as: ________________
estimates or judgments; society; synonymous and used interchangeably.
The rationale for selecting a VC for consideration in EA is normally based on its ________importance, _______importance, or __________importance.
ecological, societal, regulatory
Principles for VC Selection in the Elk Valley, British Columbia
The Elk Valley is in the Rocky Mountains in the southeastern region of British Columbia, home to the communities of Elkford, Sparwood, Hosmer, Fernie, Morrissey, and Elko. A popular tourism destination and home to many important species such as grizzly bears, bighorn sheep, and American dipper elks, the Elk Valley also contains the largest producing coalfield in British Columbia. There are five surface metallurgical coal mines operating in the valley, all owned by Teck Coal Ltd. In 2012, in response to an approval condition for a coal mine expansion they were required to to establish a cumulative effects management framework with different government bodies
VC selection was based on the following principles:
- VCS must be based on the values identified by residents of the Elk Valley, and potential linkages between values will be considered;
- any selected VC must reflect several values (ecological, social, cultural, and economic);
- there must be reason to believe that the VC is or will be affected either directly or indirectly by current or future activities in the region;
- the VC must be sensitive to several important disturbing and supportive ecological and human processes, including interactions among these processes;
- there must be sufficient scientific knowledge about the VC to allow selection of indicators that will respond in a way that can be readily measured;
- any assessment of the VC must help to inform regulatory decisions likely to be included in permits and licences for development decisions;
- the VC must represent traditional knowledge and traditional uses of the land and water resources of the Elk Valley; and
- results of the assessment of the VC must be capable of contributing to more confident decision-making
Olagunju and Gunn (2013) examined the rationale for VC selection across a sample of 11 Canadian road construction EAs and found that __________importance and _____________value were common rationales, but other rationales for VC selection included:
ecological, societal
fragility, scientific value for study or monitoring, importance to legal compliance, economic importance, professional judgment, biodiversity and conservation value, medicinal importance, recreational value, and spiritual importance.
If there is no potential for interaction between the actions or activities of the proposed project and the VC, then ____________
the VC is less likely to be considered or assessed in detail in the project EA.
To ensure that baseline studies are purposeful for managing project impacts and supporting decisions about project proposals and not simply a compilation of information about VCs, it is important to ask at least the following two questions:
- Is the VC likely to be affected, directly or indirectly, by project activities?
- Is information needed about the VC to support the assessment of project impacts on another VC?
If there is no potential for interaction between the project and the VC, then
there is no need to compile a comprehensive baseline about that VC; This is not to say that the VC should be disregarded, since it may still be of significant public concern and warrant some consideration in the impact assessment process. Or it may be determined important for understanding potential cumulative impacts and supporting regional monitoring programs even though it may not be affected by the project under consideration.
To identify the potential for interaction between VCs and project activities, practitioners often use simple
impact matrices.
impact matrices
A tool for communicating assessment information, comprised of a two-dimensional checklist of project activities on one axis and potentially affected environmental components on the other.
Matrices are commonly used for impact identification and for providing a visual aid for impact summaries.
Perhaps the best-known and most comprehensive impact matrix is the
Leopold matrix
The Leopold matrix
The Leopold matrix consists of a grid of 100 possible project actions along a horizontal axis and 88 environmental considerations along a vertical axis, for a total of 8800 possible first-order project–component interactions.
Each cell of the Leopold matrix consists of two values:
a quantification of the magnitude of the impact [strong, low] and a measure of impact significance [how important it is].
