Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal Principles and guidelines for social impact assessment in the USA : The Interorganizational Committee on Principles and Guidelines for Social Impact Assessment (original) (raw)

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This monograph provides a comprehensive update on the principles and guidelines for social impact assessment (SIA) in the United States, focusing on the implications of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). It emphasizes the necessity of evaluating the social consequences of proposed policies, plans, programs, and projects (PPPPs), detailing various social impact variables at different stages of the SIA process. Additionally, it highlights the importance of stakeholder engagement and the interconnectedness of community resources and social structures in understanding and mitigating potential negative impacts.

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NEPA and the "Beneficial Impact" EIS

2012

The National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”) requires that federal agencies prepare an environmental impact statement (“EIS”) for any major federal action “significantly affecting the quality of the human environment.” Some courts—in dicta—and some commentators have suggested that agencies must prepare an EIS for actions that will have significant beneficial impacts on the environment but no significant adverse impacts. In a recent case, the Ninth Circuit declined to address this question, but suggested that there was a circuit split on the issue. In this Article, I argue that agencies do not need to prepare such a “Beneficial Impact” EIS. First, there is actually no circuit split on the issue. All courts that have directly addressed the question have found that there is no Beneficial Impact EIS requirement. Cases that have been cited in support of such a requirement are either distinguishable or make such statements only in dicta. Second, while the statute does not directly addre...

Effective NEPA implementation: The facilitated approach

Federal Facilities Environmental Journal, 1998

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) allows applicants, states, and contractors to prepare environmental assessments (EAs) and environmental impact statements (EISs). However, under all circumstances, the federal official is held fully accountable for the scope, objectivity, content, and accuracy of the NEPA analyses and documents prepared for the agency by others. The commonly used paradigm for contracting requires contractors to conduct the analyses and prepare the documents, with federal involvement primarily limited to review and comment of partially completed deliverables. This approach results in contractors fulfilling inherently governmental responsibilities and often causing conflict, frustration, higher costs, longer execution time, and alternatives which may not meet mission objectives.

The state of environmental justice analyses in NEPA: The case of Arizona

Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 2022

As the unequal impacts of environmental harms and climate change have become apparent, environmental justice (EJ) is an increasingly salient matter in US environmental policy and impact assessments. The EJ impacts of important infrastructural decisions and investments are most often analyzed in environmental impact statements required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)—a globally influential piece of legislation—with significant discretion given to organizations on how to conduct these analyses. There is little systematic understanding of how these analyses are conducted and what the findings of these analyses tend to be. In this paper, we analyze a decade’s worth of EJ analyses that appear in environmental impact statements conducted in the state of Arizona in the US as a first attempt to fill this gap in understanding. We find that throughout EJ analyses 11 different demographic indicators, ten different community boundaries, and eight different population thresholds are used with considerable variation to identify EJ communities. The variation in how these criteria are applied points to an inconsistent definition of an EJ community throughout the federal government. Still, analyses consistently do not find negative EJ impacts to be likely. While NEPA has promoted positive environmental outcomes in the past, it may currently be failing to do this for EJ. We highlight possible flaws in EJ analysis methods and shortcomings of the NEPA process itself that may cumulatively obstruct meaningful EJ consideration. With the widespread influence of NEPA on environmental impact assesment approaches globally, our findings raise questions that EJ analyses in environmental impact assesments outside the US could suffer from the same methodological shortcomings we identify.

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