SCOPE 5 - Environmental Impact Assessment

Action: an engineering or industrial project, legislative proposal, policy progamme, or operational procedure with environmental implications. 

Aliasing: the confounding of periodicities in the behaviour of a variable, due to observations being taken at discrete time or space intervals rather than continuously. (See Figure A 1.1.) 

Alternatives, fundamentally different: alternatives which can only be compared on the basis of completely different kinds of human impacts. 

Assessor: the person, agency or company having responsibility for preparing an environmental impact assessment. 

Alternatives, incrementally different: alternatives which can be compared on the basis of similar kinds of human impacts, differing only in degree. 

Assessor: the person, agency or company having responsibility for preparing an environmental impact assessment. 

Biosphere: the transition zone between solid earth and upper atmosphere, where most living things are found. 

Comprehensiveness of an assessment method: the degree to which the method is able to detect the full range of significant environmental effects and impacts. 

Delphi method: a method of seeking consensus amongst a panel of evaluators on questions that involve value judgements of relative worth. 

Eco-development: a form of planned growth that optimizes the use of locally available resources within the constraints of the local environment . 

Environment: that which surrounds (from the French phrase ce qui entoure: in the Larousse dictionary). 

Environmental change* : a natural or man-induced alteration in the environment. 

Environmental criteria: summaries and syntheses of existing relevant information on physical, biological, sociological, and economic responses to environmental stresses. 

Environmental effect*: a man-induced environmental change. 

Environmental impact*: a change in environmental quality (the word 'impact' implies that a value judgement has been made on the importance of an environmental effect or change). 

Environmental impact assessment: an activity designed to identify and predict the impact on the biogeophysical environment and on man's health and well-being of legislative proposals, policies, programmes, projects, and operational procedures, and to interpret and communicate information about the impacts. 

Environmental Impact Statement: a term defined formally in the United States National Environment Policy Act as a summary of the environmental impact of an action and alternatives, including the non-action state.

Environmental quality: the state of the environment as perceived objectively in terms of measurements of its components, or subjectively in terms of its attributes such as beauty and worth. 

Environmental standards: limiting conditions of environmental quality, often expressed in numerical terms and usually with legal standing, that have been set by a jurisdiction to protect man's health and well-being. 

Feedback: an interaction between variables such that a change in one causes an amplification or dampening in the rate of change of another . 

Impact indicator: an environmental element or parameter that provides a measure of an impact, on at least some qualitative scale. 

Model: a simplified representation of reality . 

Monte Carlo technique: a technique used in computer simulations, in which random components are added to the values of the input variables for the purpose of determining the effects of fluctuations ('noise') on the values of the output variables; 

Mutually exclusive assessment method: a method that avoids double counting of impacts. 

Non-linear relation: a relation between two variables which, when depicted on a graph, is not a straight line. 

Proponent: a government agency or private company wishing to initiate an action with environmental implications. 

Resilience: the ability of a system (ecological, economic, or social) to absorb stresses created by external disturbances, without modification of the system. 

Reviewer: the person, agency or board with responsibility for reviewing an environmental impact assessment and ensuring compliance with published guidelines. 

Scenario: a prediction obtained from assumptions formulated to make comparisons with other scenarios rather than to predict real events or conditions. 

Selectivity of an assessment method: the efficiency of the method in focusing attention on major factors at the level of detail appropriate to the analysis. 

Sensitivity analysis: a technique used in computer simulations of deliberately changing some of the assumptions or values of the input variables for the purpose of determining the relative effects on the values of the output variables. 

Social profiling: the process of gathering relevant sociological information about a community.

*These words are defined differently in some countries (see Section 1.1)