PROGRAMME

Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is a proactive methodical process that investigates and predicts the potential direct, indirect and cumulative impacts of a proposed project/activity on various environmental components, ideally from project/activity initiation to decommissioning. The output of the above process is the Environmental Impact Study (EIS) that should be of high quality and include all the relevant information. The aim of this study is to evaluate the quality of EIS of projects/activities in Greece. The sample consists of 75 complete EIS, conducted after the issue of Law 4014/2011 and includes projects/activities of both categories A1 (extremely significant impacts) and A2 (significant impacts) and of various groups of projects (e.g. hydraulic projects, environmental infrastructure systems, renewable energy sources, industrial and related facilities). The methodology includes a structured evaluation of the above EIS, using the quality evaluation criteria checklist (8 categories and 92 evaluation criteria) of the Environmental Impact Statement Review Package developed by the Impact Assessment Unit (IAU) of Oxford Brookes University. The findings showed that the majority of EISs perform above the average grade of 2.5, when compared against the evaluation criteria. However, the studies omit important environmental and social issues, such as public consultation and alternatives.