Towards a New Instrument for Promoting Sustainability Beyond the EIA and the SEA: The Holistic Impact Assessment (HIA)

Abstract

The systemic crisis that the world is currently facing should be addressed with a shift in the dominant economic paradigm, which should be made compatible with the pursuit of (ecological) sustainability. This implies inter alia a reallocation of priorities calling not only for relevant environmental, social, economic and cultural changes, but also for legislative and policy innovations. In such a context, a new approach should be adopted in the way legal instruments for the protection of the environment are conceived and applied. For instance, a major effort of re-orientation should be made in the field of the preventive assessment of negative impacts that may be caused by projects as well as by plans and programs on the environment. In particular, the focus should be placed on two legal instruments, namely the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and the Strategic Impact Assessment (SEA), which despite being very useful tools to prevent possible negative impacts on the environment are characterised by several failures, which undermine their effectiveness. On this premise, the present contribution provides a detailed analysis of the main features and the most relevant shortcomings of these two instruments, in particular within the European Union legal system.Then, the focus of the analysis shifts on the possibility to merge EIA and SEA into a new single instrument. The new instrument, which may be named Holistic Impact Assessment (HIA), should be based upon a holistic sustainability approach, and should represent the common framework for the assessment of all the activities likely to have significant adverse effects on a certain territory. Within such a context, the two types of evaluations will continue to exist and be conducted separately, still dealing respectively with the upstream and downstream assessment, but will be placed under a single framework, inspired by a common approach, governed by the same rules and managed in a coordinated way. For all these reasons, the establishment of the HIA might be a suitable solution to promote a better approach to land planning and a more effective and coordinated prevention of all the possible negative impacts caused by either plans/programs or projects on the environment of a given territory.