Information for Environmental Impact Assessment

Environmental Impact Assessment

3 . 0 Methods for Environmental Impact Assessment

Changes in the practice of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and advances in information technology have greatly expanded the range of tools available to the EIA practitioner. For example, map overlay methods, originally pioneered by McHarg (1971), have evolved into sophisticated Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Expert systems, a branch of artificial intelligence, have been developed t...

An Approach for Environmental Impact Assessment

In the environment impacts assessment context, several methods are proposed in literature, such as life cycle analysis, multi criteria analysis and cost benefit analysis etc. Recently, others methods combining MCDA (Multi Criteria Decision Analysis) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) have been explored to develop enhanced methodologies for knowledge based decision support. In this paper, a new ap...

Decision support for local environmental impact assessment

Sustainability has become a key concern for consumers and industry. However, coming to understand its implications in the context of daily life can be difficult. It may be hard to come to terms with the idea that traditional activities present environmental risks and may lead to real emergencies, manifested differently depending on local conditions. Everyone will be asked to do more but the mov...

Application of PCRaster for environmental impact assessment using environmental models

A simplified case study shows how the PCRaster software can be used in the framework of environmental impact assessment. PCRaster comes with generic spatial functions that can be combined in a structured script. This script can be used to 1) define scenarios for human activities, 2) construct static or dynamic (i.e. temporal) spatial environmental models with these scenarios as input, and 3) to...