EIA follow-up: international best practice principles

EIA follow-up can be simply defi ned as the monitoring and evaluation of the impacts of a project or plan (that has been subject to EIA) for management of, and communication about, the environmental performance of that project or plan (Morrison-Saunders and Arts 2004). Thus, EIA follow-up comprises four elements (Arts et al., 2001): 1. Monitoring – the collection of activity and environmental data both before (baseline monitoring) and after activity implementation (compliance and impact monitoring). 2. Evaluation – the appraisal of the conformance with standards, predictions or expectations as well as the environmental performance of the activity. 3. Management – making decisions and taking appropriate action in response to issues arising from monitoring and evaluation activities. 4. Communication – informing the stakeholders about the results of EIA follow-up in order to provide feedback on project/plan implementation as well as feedback on EIA processes. Follow-up is essential for determining the outcomes of EIA. By incorporating feedback into the EIA process, follow-up enables learning from experience to occur. It can and should occur in any EIA system to prevent EIA being just a pro forma exercise.