Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA)
Introduction
Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) is a system that incorporates environmental considerations into policies, plans and programs. Although related, the term should not be confused with environmental impact assessment (EIA). It is also called Strategic Environmental Impact Assessment. The specific term Strategic Environmental Assessment refers to the European Union "Directive (European Union Law)" of that name.
History
The European Union Directive 85/337/EC on Environmental Impact Assessment (known as the EIA Directive) only applied to certain projects. This was a limitation since specific effects were only addressed at local levels while many environmentally damaging decisions were made simultaneously at a more strategic level (for example the fact that new transport infrastructure may generate an increase in transport demand).
The concept of Strategic Evaluation originated in developed countries regarding territorial planning and regional development. In 1981 the US Department of Urban and Residential Development published the Wide Area Impact Assessment Guide. In Europe the Convention on Environmental Impact Assessment in Transboundary Contexts") (also known as the Espoo Convention) established the foundations for the introduction of SEA in 1991.
The European EAE Directive (2001/42/EC) established that all Member States of the European Union should have ratified the Directive in their respective legal systems by July 21, 2004.
EU countries began to implement the territorial aspects of the SEA first, and some took longer to adopt the directive than others, but the implementation of the directive can now be considered complete. Many EU nations have a long tradition of taking a strict approach to the environment including Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland and Sweden. The new EU member states have rushed to implement the directive.
Relationship with the Environmental Impact Assessment
For the most part an SEA is carried out before the corresponding EIA is undertaken. The strategic environmental assessment should improve the evaluation of the indirect, cumulative and synergistic environmental impacts that may arise from policies, plans and programs. Likewise, it should serve to reduce the number of projects that must undergo an environmental impact assessment, simplifying the process and defining generic corrective measures for a set of projects with similar characteristics. This means that information on the environmental impact of a plan can cascade down through the different levels of decision-making and be used in an EIA in a subsequent study, in a transfer process, which should reduce the amount of work needed to be undertaken. For all these reasons, both instruments -strategic environmental assessment and environmental impact assessment- have a complementary nature and, therefore, are not mutually exclusive.