EIA(Environmental Impact Assessment) in Korea has been developed since the early 1980's. But people's concern about the EIA system divulged many problems of the system since 1990.
One of the most urgent problems to be solved is the introduction of st...
EIA(Environmental Impact Assessment) in Korea has been developed since the early 1980's. But people's concern about the EIA system divulged many problems of the system since 1990.
One of the most urgent problems to be solved is the introduction of strategic assessment. There is great difficulty to ensure the effectiveness of EIA because EIA is performed after the fixing of crucial factors of a development project such as site, road line and size.
For some public construction projects, there is a system to hear the opinion of Ministry of Environment. But this system is not activated due to the lack of subsidiary tools such as a guideline for review of EIS(Environmental Impact Statement). Especially for road construction occupying about 40% of projects accompanying EIA, there is no system, guideline or research on development of an EIA methodology to confirm the impact on the environment at the early stage of project planning. Research has been carried out on this problem and improvement of EIA methodology for roadway construction is presented. It is suggested that: i) a dichotomized structure be set up to determine the road line first and then perform EIA; ii) a comprehensive analysis method be developed to compare the environmental impacts of various alternatives; iii) EIA methodology considering characteristics of local, urban-planning and highway roads be developed; iv) post-EIA management via confirmation of predicted results and analysis of reasons of discrepancy between predicted results and observed results be improved.
Most of all, the development of a guideline to investigate the impact on the environment during the line selection step has been accomplished. Thus, 9 major categories(topography/geology, flora and fauna, land use, air quality, water quality, noise/vibration, visual impact, population/housing, cultural assets) were extracted from 23 EIA categories and essential supplement request items for environmental friendly road selection. To select environmental friendly roads, many alternatives should be compared and the assessment of each alternative must be carried out on the basis of these 9 categories. The optimal line must be selected by a comprehensive assessment considering the 9 categories. There was much difficulty in reaching a resonable conclusion. To solve this problem, research on a quantitative system of EIA methodology was carried out. The selected method was AHP(Analytic Hierarchy Process) which simplifies the complex problems utilizing hierarchy, quantifying qualitative problems through 1:1 comparison, and extracting objective conclusions by maintaining consistency.
As a result, a GUI-based program was developed which provides basic values of weighted parameters of each category defined by specialists, and a quantification of detailed assessment guidelines to ensures consistency.
Characteristics, limitations and future research topics are as follows :
·There was some doubt whether the acquisition of data required by this quantitative system would be available at the early stage of basic design. However, a studies of recent cases revealed that such a problem is rather minimal.
·Users are not able to introduce biased results without sufficient data because the weighted values and guidelines may be confirmed instantaneously within the program.
·Objectivity is confirmed because the program can check for consistency of input data.
·For assessment of various alternatives on the basis of each category, subjective decisions by users are excluded by maximum quantification of the detailed guideline.
· The time required to select the environmental friendly road is shortened while being objective, which allows for reasonable explanations for the selection.
·There is a need to improve the program for special projects requiring more than the 6 given categories.
·There is another need to quantify the detailed guideline because users who are not specialists may not be able to decide the proper items when a category has several detailed guidelines or is qualitative.
·The most optimal road can must not only consider environmental factors but also economical, technological, and safety factors. So, a more comprehensive quantitative research on EIA methodology will be needed in the future because this research was focused only on the environment.