The ecosystem services criteria for strategic decision-making combine conceptualisation and concretisation of ecologically sustainable development. A concrete basis for the measurement, valuation, and assessment of ecological sustainability was created through the development of two-level...

Sustainable urban development has been widely recognized as requiring energy and transport efficient urban growth, while ecological issues are often not well integrated in sustainability assessments and Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA). In order to achieve such integration, methods and...

November 2010 marked the 25th anniversary of the EU Environmental Impact Assessment Directive and the 20th anniversary of its implementation in Germany via the Environmental Impact Assessment Act (EIAA) in 1990. Reflecting back to the original role model for these pieces of legisiation, the 1969...

Since Brazilian healthcare institutions have the duty to care about public health service, they also have the social and financial responsibilities to bring environmentally friendly practices and strategies, including principally a responsible attitude towards hospital waste management....

The generation and use of spatial information has significantly increased in recent years. Its importance has been magnified by the INSPIRE Directive, which has subsequently led to specific requirements within several legislative frameworks, such as the Water Framework and Noise Directives, for...

Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) has now passed its first 25 years and looking back it becomes clear that it has changed its direction. In this article we will look closer at how different pressures have pushed it in the direction of decentralisation and deliberative democracy, while other...

Causality, or the relation of cause and effect, is a fundamental notion in impact assessment, indicating how impacts arise from development actions. In the context of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), recent research in the UK has indicated that impact statements typically do not contain...

This paper reports the findings of a survey in 2009 of European practitioners who face problems related to accessing and using spatial data when preparing reports for Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) and Strategic Environmental Assessments (SEAs). The survey was designed to be comparable...

SEA was introduced in China in 2003 by the EIA Law. However, most Chinese provinces were slow to establish their own SEA systems. This paper reviews the Chinese SEA institutional arrangements, regulations and documents, both, at national and at provincial levels. The paper concludes that the...

Cumulative environmental effects from the offshore oil and gas industry in Canada are inadequately addressed in the Environmental Assessment process due to the complexity of analysis required to overcome unknowns with respect to offshore environments. Limited Environmental Assessments can lead...