Introduction

An initial assessment has the objective helping project desk officers and planners to assess a project in relation to environmental impacts. The initial assessment shall provide a survey of environmental impacts likely to ensue if a project is implemented. Usually an initial assessment will be based on easily accessible information, former research, the local population's views, etc.

Only potential environmental impacts, direct and indirect, are identified in the initial assessment. Estimates are not assumed to be substantiated by special accounts or registrations, but rather come under a full assessment. An initial assessment ought to be mastered by personnel without specialist knowledge of that particular project type, or of environmental consequences in general. In the course of an initial evaluation, the project desk officer may nevertheless find it necessary to consult environmental expertise.

The initial assessment should attempt to clarify both positive and negative environmental impacts. However, since the major positive effects are usually included in the main project account, the initial assessment will tend to lean towards potential negative impacts.

The EIA-system affords no easy solutions to weighing positive and negative aspects against one another in a decision-making process. This is because there are seldom clear objective criteria or threshold values for which environmental effects are acceptable or not.

This booklet provides a survey of required information as well as questions that need to be answered in an initial assessment of projects and activities within water supply, wastewater management, and irrigation.

To offer a brief overview of the subject, Part I describes what these project categories normally comprises, and what environmental impacts in particular can be expected. It stresses an account of the special problems often faced by projects and activities in developing countries and tropical areas.

Part II offers a more specific account of the kind of information that ought to be available as well as questions that should be answered in an initial assessment of projects.