Environmental Impact Assessment for Urban Planning and Development Using Gis

Cites are the magnet for the growth of the social, economic and political development of the country. It has a power for the development of large-scale and smallscale industries, educational institutions, administrative offices, public and commercial establishments etc. In turn it attracts more migration from the rural area to the urban area, or shifting from one urban center to another urban center. So the population density is getting magnified in certain pockets of the cities. There will be an incredible need for basic amenities like housing, water, sewage management and transportation. The vital on urban land availability is tremendous and there will be a certain chance of deviation in the city plan (eg. master plan i.e. changes in the land use). As a result there will be a categorical damage of historical, biological, archeological, aesthetic and visual impacts and pollution in land, water, air and noise,. There should therefore be a definite impact assessment for any such type of development to safeguard the city environment. The conventional way of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) study is a less accurate and more time consuming process because it has more dependant and independent variables which have to be taken in to account (eg. Landuse, land price, population density, socio -economic level, road accessibility, railway accessibility, air quality, ground water quality, noise level, biological content, historical value, archeological and visual importance), which also have different consequences. There needs to be a tool or support system, which can handle the larger volume of spatial and non-spatial data, to be capable of complexity of analysis and produce an alternative plan. Remote Sensing, Photogrammetry and GIS are the latest technologies and tools, which will produce much more accurate results and perform various geographic analyses even in complex situations. This paper will articulate the different factors to be considered for impact assessments for urban planning and development, and lists about the data which can be useful for this study, the previous study which was done in a similar area in another part of country, and detailed methodology which can be adopted for this are discussed.