Environmental Impact Assessment and Environmental Risk Assessment: Review of Concepts, Steps and Significance

Abstract

Environmental Impact Assessment is an assessment of the possible positive or negative impact a proposed project will have on the environment, considering the natural, social and economic aspects. while Environmental risk assessment assess the likelihood of your business activities or operation causing harm to the environment, it involves the process of assessing the risk human activities may have on the environment, the environment here includes human beings (health hazards impact) and ecology (impacts on fauna and flora). This includes describing potential hazards and impacts before taking precautions to reduce the associated risks. . It uses similar techniques to the health and safety risk assessment your business already has to perform. A risk assessment typically involves many steps and forms the backbone of the overall risk management plan. A risk analysis is one of those steps—the one in which you determine the defining characteristics of each risk and assign each a score based on your findings. The major differences between environmental impact assessment and environmental risk assessment includes the following: While environmental impact assessment is a broad field that includes all activities that attempt to analyze and evaluate the effects of human and related actions on the environment, risk assessment are generally concerned with the relatively well-defined regulatory problems and employs formal quantitative analysis of the potential risk. This paper highlights the concept of environmental impact assessment and environmental risk assessment, their steps and significance and gives the case histories of both environmental impact assessment and environmental risk assessment.