Over the past 50 years, impact assessment has been affirmed on a global scale as an important tool to support decision making. Initially focused on assessing the environmental impacts of projects (air and water quality, noise,... [ view full abstract ]
Over the past 50 years, impact assessment has been affirmed on a global scale as an important tool to support decision making. Initially focused on assessing the environmental impacts of projects (air and water quality, noise, nature conservation, etc.), the focus gradually spread to other dimensions: health impacts or, more recently, climate impacts. From EIA it was extended to ESHIA (Environmental, Social and Health Impact Assessment). Impact assessment is no longer limited to identifying the socio-environmental effects of a project to contribute to the perception of the best project to promote in a given territorial context. As the thematic of analysis was extended, in a slow transition from the natural and exact sciences to the social and political sciences, it also spread to more strategic decision-making scales and therefore challenged the multi-scalarity, multi-dimensional and multi-actor contributions to system analysis and transformation. The objective of this presentation is to describe a broader scoping approach developed to identify the environmental and social issues and impacts of undertaking a land transport project linking northern Brazil with a new port on Guyana’s coast, which the best location for its construction has also to be made. There has been a long history of discussions and studies relating to the improvement of the current 450 km long road that bisects a Rainforest Reserve in Guyana as well as indigenous communities that depend on the forest. Recently, the Inter-American Development Bank awarded a technical assignment to conduct a scoping exercise that lead to the preparation of terms of reference of a Country Environmental Assessment (CEA), a Strategic Environmental and Social Assessment (SESA) and an Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA) of the project(s). The goal is to discuss how the complexity of the issues at stake lead to the design of a tiered assessment process to construct an integrated vision of the CEA, SESA and ESIA. It further debates how each tier should correspond to a specific spatial, institutional and temporal scale in order to address the complexity of planning and decision-making within which transformative change must occur. The methodology adopted to this scoping exercise was broader than usual and included the identification of ex-ante conditionalities needed for project success, of critical factors for decision-making and of valued socio-environmental components as well as the discussion on the governance of the assessment process. This process was supported by a compact and wide-ranging participative process with 22 sessions involving 170 individuals from Guyana and Brazil. This novel comprehensive approach can contribute to support planning transitions and multi-dimensional decision making processes for the sustainable development of the country that involves large sectors of the society: transport, industry, economy, natural resources, environment, education, tourism, etc. Such complex and determinant planning initiatives for the future of a country need to be supported by comprehensive scoping processes.
Keywords: national land-use planning, environmental and social impact assessment, Guyana, large transport project
6a. Land use and planning
