Biodiversity in SEA: a new field of expertise

To facilitate consideration of cumulative impacts and the early consideration of environmental and social constraints in a planning process, there has been a growing demand for Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) and an increase in the number of countries introducing SEA legislation. It is generally agreed that effective safeguarding of biodiversity is only possible if ecological constraints and possibilities are identified early in the development planning cycle, well in advance of individual development proposals. The SEA tool has been developed for this purpose as it identifies impacts further ‘upstream’ in the planning process, including biodiversity impacts. A classical case of late realisation of biodiversity impacts is provided by the US$17.6 billion Korean High-Speed Railway Project, of which construction was delayed for five years because of unacceptable biodiversity impacts and related social uprising and court cases. Conservationists have called for legislators to update the EIA system to encourage biodiversity conservation during the early planning stages of development. Towards this end, the Korean Ministry of Environment introduced SEA, which requires environmental impact studies during the early stages of development planning, thus allowing them to be used as a decision-making tool (Sang, 2005).

In general, SEA enables consideration of the status of biodiversity over a longer time frame and for larger geographical areas. It offers solutions to some of the shortcomings commonly attributed to project-level Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), including the difficulties inherent to considering cumulative or landscape-scale ecological effects (Treweek, 2001). Many threats to the long-term survival of biodiversity are individually insignificant but collectively serious. By definition, ‘cumulative’ environmental effects are not attributable to any one source of activity and cannot be regulated in isolation.