The Hindu Business Line : Environment management — Sensational versus sustainable development

PALPITATION is a condition in which a man becomes acutely aware of the working of his own heart. A normal, healthy person is hardly aware of this, and if he is, then he has a problem. The environment was taken for granted for centuries. It is only in the second half of the 20th century that man has started noticing symptoms of environmental palpitation, even occasional missed heart beats.

The crux of the environmental problem is one of inter-generational equity and sustainability in resource consumption.

Human life depends on resource consumption. In the environmental context, it means conversion of a resource from a usable to a non-usable form, temporarily, for long periods or permanently. Fortunately, much of this conversion process is reversible either by conscious human effort or by merely by letting nature take its course. The exponential rate of growth of the human population and resource consumption have left outstripped the rate of reversibility. Environmental management involves trade-off decisions using a tool called Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA).

It is a feasibility report, just like the technical or financial feasibility reports prepared for most projects before they are implemented. It is, of course, possible to do a post-project EIA for any project. In the case of the environment, the danger is that some of the consequences of a project may be irreversible and a post-mortem may not serve any preventive purpose (unless it is for a similar future project). While a post-project EIA could be part of a management information system for monitoring the actual effects for comparison with the expected, it cannot replace a pre-project EIA in terms of preventive value.

EIA's three aspects — environment, impact and analysis — need to be defined in operational terms.

Environment is a resource bundle. We have to confine ourselves to an identifiable, manageable system and its bundle of resources. The boundaries of such a system would depend on practical considerations such as available men, money and time, our main area of concern and the state of our technical knowledge of the working of the system. In a multi-purpose river project, the system to be studied could be the main project and its immediate neighbourhood, the entire river basin, the entire area expected to be benefited or damaged. If there is one thing we know for certain about the environment, it is its capacity for constantly springing surprises on man. The word `impact' refers to the probable impact of the project on the resources of the system studied. Environmental resources may be classified as basic (air, land, water, flora), developmental (ocean, minerals), and cultural (heritage such as monuments and natural wonders, aesthetic such as views, vistas, scenery, absence of noise and smell).

Any damage to basic resources would be life-threatening, to developmental resources would retard economic development and to cultural resources would deprive us of aesthetic and spiritual joys.

A resource could degenerate in three ways — depletion (oil, coal), degradation (air, water, soil, monuments) or displacement (soil, nutrients). In each type, we should know whether it is significantly irreversible and needs urgent preventive/corrective action. To this uncertainty, we should not add the certainty of known adverse effects resulting from a failure to do a proper EIA. If the resource involved is basic, it would be safer, and wiser, to assume that any unknown effect would be adverse unless proved otherwise. This is known as the `precautionary principle'.

Thus, an EIA's rationale is to prevent, wherever possible, irreversible damage to environmental resources. The mechanics of an EIA consists broadly of the following steps:

Ecosystem evaluation: define system boundaries, prepare inventory of resources in the system, highlight specially-sensitive areas;

Classify resources: relating to survival, developmental, quality of life

project parameters: inputs, outputs ( including effluents , emissions and other waste products), process, operating culture (normal and locally realistic and not ideal);

Constitution of the EIA team: multidisciplinary with relevant local knowledge;

Prepare maps, checklists: for collecting and exhibiting data;

Classify the impact of each project parameter on each type of resource according to its degree of reversibility;

Quantify the degenerative effect on the resource, wherever possible, in physical or economic terms

Indicate corrective steps where known;

Indicate areas of uncertainty/ignorance to be closely monitored.

A convenient, easily understandable method of presenting the impact is through map overlay technique. Transparent maps are prepared, one for each environmental resource, and each level of intensity of adverse impact (from negligible to catastrophic) on the resource is allotted one colour. When all these transparent maps are overlaid, those parts of the system where the cumulative adverse impact is the maximum or covers many resources, will become visually obvious. It should also be possible to feed project parameters into a computerised system map and get a printout of an impact overlay map.

For each of the several possible locations for a project, an impact overlay map could me made and the best location selected so as to minimise the overall adverse environmental impact on the system.

While the above indicates the basic EIA methodology, the following are

some of the general issues on which appropriate policies have to be adopted so as to be supportive of, and sensitise people to the need for, EIA:

Agencies clearing foreign investments and financing institutions should insist on a full-fledged EIA for all major and sensitive projects as part of the normal feasibility report.

Indicators of local water and air purity should be published in newspapers daily, at least in major industrial and other environmentally-sensitive areas, so as to sensitise and mobilise public opinion in favour of good environmental management.

The health of selected large sensitive and fragile natural systems — the atmosphere, rivers, lakes, rain forests, oceans, wildlife, and ancient monuments — should be continuously monitored.

The distortion caused by treating the maintenance of existing resources as low priority non-Plan expenditure and fresh exploitation of natural resources as priority Plan expenditure has to be corrected.

Sufficient expertise on EIA should be developed among those concerned with the formulation, appraisal and implementation of projects.

The Government could subsidise training and consultancy services in this area. A proper mechanism is also necessary for accrediting such agencies.

EIA reports of all projects should be in the public domain, accessible to any citizen and accepted only after a public hearing.

It should be obligatory for all boards of directors to monitor the status of energy conservation and environmental management in their companies.

Some of the problematic areas relating to EIA where decisions are not easy and have to be continuously upgraded based on feedback are:

When to insist on an EIA an when not to? Should it be for each and every project or only for projects of a certain minimum size or financial outlay, or in certain geographical areas?

Already project formulation and implementation in our country is riddled with red tape. Should EIA add to this?

Which agency should do the EIA — the implementing agency itself, a private consultant, an ad hoc body of experts to be set up each time by government or a permanent statutory autonomous body?

How to build up expertise on EIA and how to keep it updated?

What standards of environmental conservation should be prescribed — the BAT (best available technology), or BPT (best practicable technology)?

Or, BPT to start with to be upgraded to BAT within a time limit?

Should the same standards be enforced on all projects or different standards depending on affordability?

How to evaluate the costs and benefits of an EIA when some would be quantifiable and others not?

What to do in the case of new products/technologies whose impact is still unknown?

Whether the EIA in a particular case benefits the poor or the rich or everyone?

The final decision to order an EIA in an individual case often depends on a kind of ` best judgement'.

Environmental management involves a conscious trade-off between the values of sensational and sustainable development. The choice has to be born of deliberation and not desperation or short-sightedness, and using all available tools of management including EIA. The fact that we are lagging behind the West in technology has the positive aspect that we can benefit from its mistakes. There may be limits to growth but not, hopefully, to learning. Let us not wait till we hear the thunder, and then vainly search for the lightning which has already struck.

(The author is a former Special Chief Secretary, Government of Andhra Pradesh.)

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