Evaluation of public participation and methodologies adopted in environmental impact assessment process in Sri Lanka

Abstract

"Environment" and "Development" are interdependent and mutually reinforcing each other. The ultimate goal and purpose of both environment and development policies is betterment, improvement and the enhancement of the quality of life. Exploitation of natural and human resources should be planned carefully to ensure a sustainable development. In order to ensure a sustainable development, Western Countries have introduced a planning tool, i.e. Environmental Impact Assessment process to assess the impacts of any development project to its environment. Mitigatory measures also suggested in the EIA report to minimize the negative impacts. Public involvement is one of the significant and important events in the Environmental Impact Assessment Process. This process expects to ensure that the environmental concerns are incorporated into the project. In order to fulfill this requirement, it is necessary to seek public participation throughout the project development process. The ETA process has built-in openings for public participation. Therefore, it needs to investigate whether such participation has been effective or needs improvement to ensure that the development works are not slowed down. The main objective of the study is to identity the present level of public participation in IEE/EIA projects and the methodologies used for development projects. To achieve this objective, thirteen IEEs and fifteen EIAs were selected. The respective IEE/EIA reports and administrative files were analyzed. After analyzing the IEE/EIA reports and files, public participation was looked at in different aspects, i.e. the sectors participated, the stages in the EIA process, the issues raised by the public in their comments and the methodologies adopted in the EIA process. These aspects were studies under different project types, i.e. Mainly IEE/EIA, Effluent generating/Effluent non-generating and localized/spatially distributed projects. Accordingly, general public participation on TEE project is very low compared that with the EIA projects. Study reveals general public participation on IEE projects is 2% and in EIA projects 98%. The overall public response on development projects are fairly low. Data reveals the maximum overall participation on development projects is only 42%. Also, the public is highly concern on social impacts specially in EIA projects, Effluent non-generating projects and spatially distributed projects.