On Jan 1, 1970 the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was signed into law. NEPA’s principal, and most innovative, feature was its requirement that an environmental impact assessment (EIA) be prepared for every recommendation or report on proposals for legislation and other major Federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment. Since NEPA’s enactment, many other EIA laws and policies have been adopted, but the regime created by NEPA remains one of the most comprehensive and far-reaching in existence.
In 1985 the European Community Council issued a Directive requiring all EC Member States to institute EIA procedures for certain categories of public and private projects. The purpose of the Directive was to harmonize the environmental policies of the Member States and to lessen any economic or trade imbalance that might result from the adoption of individual EIA laws by Member States. The World Bank, largely in response to pressure from environmental and development groups, adopted EIA procedures in 1989 and revised them in 1991. In February 1992 the new European Bank for Resconstruction and Development (EBRD), also at the urging of the environmental and development communities, implemented its own EIA policy based largely on the World Bank policy. The Czech Republic enacted its EIA law on April 15, 1992. A draft law written for Slovakia is scheduled to go into effect July 1, 1993. The Czech and Slovak laws have some features in common with the other laws and policies discussed here and a number of features that are unique.
This paper analyzes these laws and policies in light of a variety of issues relevant to all EIA systems. It discusses such topics as establishing which activities require preparation of an EIA,preliminary assessment (screening) of proposed actions, timing and “scope” of the EIA, types of impacts to be considered, consideration of alternative actions, review and decision-making, and the role of the public. Each section begins with a short discussion of the issue under consideration, followed by descriptions of how the issue is treated in each of the six regimes. NEPA is discussed first because, while it is certainly not a perfect law, it is the most comprehensive and, together with its supplemental regulations, the most well-developed of the regimes considered in this paper. Thus, in many ways it provides a good “case study” of the application of the principles of EIA. The other laws and policies are discussed in the order of their importance to lawmakers and citizens in the Czech and Slovak Republics, beginning with the Czech and Slovak laws and followed by the EC Directive, the World Bank policy, and EBRD policy.