Environmental impact assessment studies for mining area in Goa, India, using the new approach.

Abstract

The mining industry is a fundamental source for building infrastructures and an enabler for a country's growth. Over the last decade, the act of mining has been among the top in the list of human activities which has the most disturbing and catastrophic impacts on environment, therein extensively affecting the ecological, economic, and social elements in the vicinity. There is an exigency for a pragmatic balance to exist between the global demand satisfaction of metal and environmental sustenance. In this paper, a comprehensive case study on Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) of a mining site has been presented using the new approach. This new approach is an improved version of the traditional matrix method, incorporating a modified version of Rapid Impact Assessment Matrix (RIAM) integrated with analytical hierarchy process (AHP), thereby knocking out the limitations in the existing EIA techniques. The data used in this study is an outcome of a broad survey conducted among the people associated in both direct and indirect ways to the project actions related to the mining industry and, hence, minimizing issues such as assessors' reproducibility, subjectivity, and non-inclusivity of all stakeholders' opinion, which can contribute to misleading outcomes. This new approach delivers more precise and practical results for the assessment of environmental impact data.