Environmental Planning and Sustainable Development
This domain tests environmental assessment procedure and the physical limits that planning must respect: carrying capacity, airsheds, aquifers and heat.
Rules and concepts
- EIA procedure - screening (does it need assessment?), scoping (which impacts?), baseline, prediction, significance, mitigation, monitoring and post-audit. Strategic environmental assessment applies to plans and programmes, EIA to projects.
- Iranian practice - environmental assessment became a statutory requirement for large development projects in the 1990s and is administered through the environmental authorities; categories of projects requiring assessment are listed, not discretionary.
- Concepts - carrying capacity, ecological footprint, triple bottom line, green infrastructure, urban heat island, water-sensitive design, resilience, cumulative impacts.
- Iranian pressure points - urban air quality, aquifer depletion and land subsidence on the Tehran plain, wetland and river-basin stress.
Worked example
A 500-hectare township is proposed on a plain with falling groundwater. Screening: the project falls in a listed category, so assessment is mandatory. Scoping selects groundwater drawdown, air quality, traffic and habitat. Baseline: piezometric trend already declining, so the marginal impact of new abstraction is significant. Prediction: demand of the township exceeds recharge; subsidence risk is irreversible. Mitigation hierarchy: avoid (reduce density, refuse the wellfield), minimise (reuse, demand management), compensate (restore recharge elsewhere). Monitoring: piezometers and air-quality stations with reporting obligations. Note that mitigation cannot rescue an impact that is irreversible and cumulative - avoidance is the only defensible answer.
Traps
- Treating EIA as a justification document produced after the design is fixed.
- Confusing SEA (plan level) with EIA (project level).
- Ignoring cumulative and indirect impacts.