Environmental Impact Statement

Origins

The EIS originated from the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969, becoming law in 1970, which required that federal agencies conduct an EIA and prepare an EIS indicating, for any development or action with the potential to affect significantly the quality of the human environment, that the agencies have assessed and considered the environmental and socioeconomic consequences of the proposal. Since NEPA, the requirements for the preparation of an EIS have extended to include both public and private proposals and undertakings; however, the requirements for the assessment of private undertakings that do not involve a government agency vary from one EIA system to the next.

Many of the first EISs completed, under NEPA and elsewhere, were highly technical in nature, focused on detailed descriptions of project design, characterized by large inventories of biophysical data about the local environment, and completed after the development had already commenced. By the mid 1970s, many EISs were thousands of pages in length, contained multiple volumes of facts, and were often of limited value to the public and to decision makers. It was not until the mid 1980s, with the introduction of the scoping process in EIA, that EISs started to play a more meaningful role in development decision making—available to the public and decision makers prior to development actions and containing less technical description and more analytical focus on a limited range of environmental effects and their implications. The scoping processes stressed the importance of focusing EIA on a select few priority environmental components, referred to as valued ecosystem components, for the purpose of more efficient and informative impact analysis.

EISs continued to evolve throughout the 1980s and early 1990s in response to several international developments, such as the 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development and the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the Earth Summit), placing increased emphasis on the interrelationships between project actions, environmental change, and the resulting social and economic impacts. In recent years, with the growth of sustainability awareness, EISs have also begun to address the potential positive impacts of development proposals.

Contents of an EIS

The content of an EIS varies depending on the regulatory and policy requirements of the EIA system and on the complexity of the proposal. In the United States, for example, the requirements of an EIS are detailed under the 1978 U.S. Council of Environmental Quality Guidelines. In Canada, general guidance is provided under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act and by the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency. All EISs must include a description of the proposed action, including a statement of its purpose, and a description of the affected environment that is sufficient to allow an assessment of the potential impacts of the proposed action. An EIS typically consists of six major

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