Sustainable Development Evaluation of Road Infrastructure Programmes and Projects

Section 3: A sustainability assessment process for road-building and other development in Ireland

Abstract

In this section we propose a sustainability assessment process. To oversee the sustainability assessment process, we recommend the creation of a new office, housed in the EPA, called the Office of Sustainability Assessment. We wish to emphasise that we are not proposing a separate strand of assessment in addition to Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) and Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), but rather an overall structure within which they would be included. We believe our proposal would not require any changes to existing EU legislation on SEA and EIA, but could of course serve as a model for a revision of existing SEA and EIA processes.

In this document we primarily use roads as an example of how the sustainability assessment process would function. However, we believe that the model can be used for all forms of transportation-planning and other projects also; examples of the latter are land-use planning and development.

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