Sustainable development in professional planning: a potential contribution of the EIA and UET concepts

Social and economic goals realised through development are unattainable without the use of resources and negative environmental impacts. The integration of conservation and development and the concept of sustainable development indicate how detrimental development impacts can be curtailed whilst its benefits are not lost. The main progress in this field is usually linked with Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA). It can be questioned, however, whether they have reached the roots of environmental decay in the development decision making processes. Planners can argue that location, scale and type of development are decided prior to EIA involvement. This precludes environmentally proactive planning. The article advocates the need for integration of ecological considerations to the planning process from its outset through the concept of "framing" development by spatial, quantitative, qualitative and temporal environmental dimensions indicated in the planning process. From these dimensions development constraints may be derived. They can be overcome at varying investment, ecological or aesthetic costs and represent environmental thresholds to development. This concept has led to the formulation of the Ultimate Environmental Threshold (UET) method which is compared in the article with EIA to identify their potential contribution in the integration of ecological considerations into professional planning. The evidence shows that billions are spent for an ex post removal of environmental damage resulting from erroneous development decisions. A lot of these costs can be attributed to planning blunders which could have been prevented had ecological thinking been introduced into early stages of the planning process. Commonly, however, plans do not have identifiable impact assessments and measures mitigating adverse environmental impacts, derived from EIAs, are applied to the already allocated land uses. In addition, the lists of developments of which EIAs are legally required is revealing not by what is in it but by what is not, as developments potentially threatening to the natural environment are often absent on these lists. The EIAs are preventative but also partially reactive as they are to mitigate the impact of proposals generated without their contribution. The UET is more proactive as it has been designed to set an environmentally sound "frame" for the formulation of these proposals. Cost savings derived from preventing ecological blunders at the outset of development decision making may be substantial as this is the only time when major changes to the location, scale or type of development can be made without serious cost implications while changes afterwards are always much more difficult. Some research programmes to refine the UET method are proposed by this article which also illustrates the two approaches by hypothetical case studies.