Strategic Environmental Assessment Of Plans Research Articles

STRATEGIC ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT FOR PLANS, PROGRAMS, POLICIES IN ROMANIA: MULTI-CRITERIAL METHOD

The purpose of Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) is to ensure that environmental considerations inform and are integrated into strategic decision-making in support of environmentally sound and sustainable development. In particular, the SEA process assists authorities responsible for plans and programs, as well as decision-makers. The main benefits of SEA consist in: providing high level of environmental protection, improvement of the quality of plan, program or policy making, increases the efficiency of decision making, facilitation of identification of new opportunities for development, prevention of costly mistakes, increases the overall transparency of strategic decision-making and allows the early consideration of the opinions of key stakeholders in the plan or program making process and facilitation of trans-boundary cooperation. The purpose of this paper is to describe the state of the art of strategic environmental assessment procedure in Europe, the way of its implementation in Romania. This paper also presents a multicriteria method that could be applied for strategic environmental assessment of plans or programs.

Strategic environmental assessment of plans and programs: a methodology for estimating effects on biodiversity.

We developed a methodology for biodiversity evaluations within the process of Strategic Environmental Assessment and we applied it to the estimation of the effect of two Regional Plans of Development on all bird species inhabiting the Castilla y León region (northwestern Spain). The methodology is based on the evaluation of the effects of main development actions on the habitat requirements of species. From these evaluations, and from data on the current distribution and population size (number of individuals) of each species, we estimated the most likely pattern of distribution and population size after the full implementation of the plans for each species. The impacts of the plans were quantified as the differences between the pre- and postproject patterns after codifying them to compensate for differences in the quality of the information available among species. Overall, we conclude that the proposed methodology fulfills the requirements for its use within the SEA process as it allows for the assessment of cumulative impacts on every species, highlighting the development directions and the habitat types with major impacts, and ascertaining whether impacts affect species with either low or high conservation and/or economic value. Generalization of the proposed methodology to other regions or species will require wildlife-habitat models adequate for SEA analyses, so that we also propose guidelines for the development and validation of these models.