NEW APPROACH TO THE MEASUREMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS: OBJECTIVITY AND REPLICABILITY Sofia Viegas, Portugal New Challenges in the European Area: Young Scientist’s 1st International Baku Forum BAKU CITY, AZERBAIJAN REPUBLIC, MAY 20 – 25, 2013

Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA)  crucial preventive tool in environment policy and spatial planning  best way to promote sustainable growth  important to develop efficient tools In particulary to quantifying environmental impacts on Biodiversity

Quantifying an impact  enables assessing its importance  allows the establishment of effective measures to avoid, minimize and/or compensate for its effects  it is globally accepted that the necessary tools must be objective, accurate and producing scientifically verifiable results

Framework  While accepting the need for expeditious and objective methodologies for EIA, information on how to implement these methodologies is clearly limited  Although there are guidelines to quantify impacts, typically this is not done  At present there is no uniformity of methodologies to assess the impacts, preventing the rigorous and objective comparison between different projects  There is great difficulty in defining such methodologies for biological descriptors (flora and fauna) – given its dynamic nature and the difficulty in parameterizing

Main Goal  create a methodology to quantify environmental impacts on biodiversity  to meet the demands of Portuguese legislation (stemming from European law)  completed with information from several national and international sources that are involved in EIA Extended research was undertaken in order to improve currently used methods

Results  The proposed methodology consists of an algorithm that combines two components:  magnitude (quantity and quality of environmental modified receptor) calculated through indicators that were specifically developed to achieve this goal  incidence (severity of impact) calculated through combining attributes that further describe the impact

Results Impact Value (Vi) = Magnitude × Incidence total impacts Sum of the values ​​ of the partial impact Scale of significance number of impacts negligible impact very significant impact

Results  An objective, scientifically verifiable and replicable method to quantify impacts  The end result of this algorithm is a better evaluation of impact  grading it through a scale that characterizes impact in order of significance  allowing the comparison between projects

Discussion  Work done focuses on one important issue in Environmental Impact Assessment : Manage constraints of:  Time  Resources  Costs  Quality  Accuracy  Feasibility Ensure the best quality / price / brevity

Thank you for your attention! Sofia Viegas