5.

Methodology

Different methods are used to assess environmental impacts. In general, it is possible to state that the basic methodology for environmental impact assessment includes the following steps:

Description of a project

Description of a territory

Evaluation of the state of the territory (by environmental compartments)

Assessment of the quality of the territory concerned in order to objectively assess the impacts of the project (different will be, for example, the impacts of a transport structure in the natural environment of the forest and in the anthropogenically burdened area of the suburban landscape).

Identification and description of impacts of a projects

• Identified impacts are categorized (e.g. direct, indirect, short-term, long-term, etc.),
• The aim of this step is to identify with maximum accuracy all potential impacts on the environment and public health.

Assessment of the impacts of a projects on the territory, including cumulation and synergies

• Forms the substantive part of environmental and public health impact assessments, within which individual identified and described impacts are assessed, most often according to the magnitude and significance of their manifestations. If significant negative environmental impacts are identified, it is not possible to authorize the plan.
• The specific and non-negligible part of the assessment is the so-called assessment of cumulative and synergistic effects, which is often monitored and reviewed by non-governmental organizations.
  • Cumulative effects: joint action of the same impact from multiple sources (for example: noise from the road and nearby highway, land occupation by construction of the industrial zone and new highway),
  • Synergistic effects: joint action of various impacts.

Draft measures and recommendations

• Usually, it is a set of conditions and measures for further project preparation, but also for the period of implementation, operation and eventual terminal of the operation for the plan.
• After the “infringement amendment”, authorized persons are encouraged by the Ministry of the Environment to make the mitigating conditions and measures very specific, addressing and do not contain requirements stemming primarily from legislation or from other decisions and documents.

As part of these steps, specific methodological approaches are applied:

Screening and scoping

Screening is a characteristic description and discovery of as much information as possible about territory that could potentially be affected by a particular projects or strategy.

In scoping, based on all the information identified in the previous step, the scope and content of the EIA Report is set as accurately as possible (the merit of assessing impacts on individual compartments of the environment and their interactions).

Multi-criteria analysis

According to the individual compartments of the environment, specific criteria are defined (e.g. land occupation, affecting land protection classes, forest occupation by categories, by extent, affecting specially protected areas, etc.), and then the degree of importance is determined for them. For example, it applies that affecting a national nature reserve has a greater weight (the degree of impact importance) than the land occupation in the first class protection of the agricultural land fund (ALF).

Subsequently, the project is assessed according to the individual criteria with respect to the weights (the values of weights are added together) and in the case of a variant solution, the final value of individual variants is compared and their order is determined.

Modelling a potential impact

An irreplaceable place in the environmental impact assessment has modelling of the range of potential impacts and their possible consequences for selected environmental compartments; typically for air pollution (model of emissions and consequently the pollutant contribution in the air), noise burden model of the territory, but in specific cases, for example, also the hydrological model of how the territory is influenced by overflowing of water during floods or when assessing the visual impact on the landscape.