Environmental Impact Assessment: Identifying the Environmental Effects of a Project

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Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is ‘the process of decision making by identifying the potentially significant environmental effects and risks of a project’. Environmental impact analysis is one of the stages of an EIA (Sadler and McCabe, 2002). Environmental impact analysis is a process of providing decision makers with an indication of the likely consequences of their action (Wathern, 2013). This stage comprises impact identification and determination of the significance of the impacts. Impact identification is the process of illustrating cause and effect relationship of a project activities and key environmental aspects. It needs a systematic expert knowledge and judgment (Sadler and McCabe, 2002). In this study, key environmental aspects are activities in the two processing units of MCF that interact directly with the surrounding environment and results to environmental impacts. 2.2.2. Impact significance determination Significance is the intensity of impacts. Intensity can include beneficial or determinant, reversible or irreversible, repairable or irreparable, short term or long term, temporary or continuous, local, regional or global accidental or planned, direct or indirect and cumulative or single (Canter & Canty,1993). Significance determination is a process of judgment making about what is important, desirable or acceptable (Lawrence, 2007a&b; Sippe, 1999). Impact significance determination is prediction of impact magnitude (Thompson, 1990). It is considering impact characteristics such as magnitude, duration, frequency, spatial distribution, reversibility, likelihood) (Beanlands & Duinker, 1983). According to Canter & Canty (1993), impact significance determination has conceptual relationship with screening and... ... middle of paper ... ...ed from four sectors of the region where the factory is found. These experts were selected purposively based on their responsibilities, because these are major sectors in Tigray regional state that has experts to assess and control factories. In line to this, 60 employees were selected in the factory (30 from CRM and 30 from COK). By clustering the employees who are working in the two processing units based on their working shift for ensuring participation, and selected ten employees using simple random method from each shifts. 2.3.3. Household Survey In addition to the respondents from the factory and outside sectors, the study used local community living around the factory for comparison purpose. The study selected 120 local households from a total of 1122 households using simple random method. Data were collected from the households using structured interview.

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