Chapter 10 - Environmental impact and risk assessment

Abstract

Environmental impact assessment (EIA), one of the most used environmental management tools, has being focused on the evaluation of the negative effects on environmental quality and human health. Nowadays, integrative approaches consider EIA together with risk assessment (RA), life cycle assessment (LCA), and multi-criteria decision-making techniques. EIA relies on tools for either impact identification or prediction, and has a common base with RA. The integrated impact and risk assessments are derived from the authorities’ need to better reason their decisions and are based on a combination of two or more methods that are applied to quantify the impact and risk of certain activities or projects, so as to generate robust results and reduce uncertainties. This chapter presents EIA’s main goals, key concepts, assumptions, and target audience, as well as the impact quantification in practice associated to the RA and integrated methods. New indices developed for impact quantification and the correlation with LCA are presented as well. Moreover, and related to the most applied methods in EIA, new working principles are proposed to quantify the environmental impacts in case of industrial activities.