The need for setting optimal geographical and temporal boundaries for infrastructure project design and EIA, and how science and technology can help

All infrastructure projects generate significant effects on the environment and their surrounding communities, but to varying degrees depending on their nature, scale and context. The environmental Impact assessment process, despite its title, attempts to assess the social effects of projects alongside environmental impacts. However, EIAs are often undertaken after the overall scope of the project has been settled. Strategic environmental assessment (SEA), on the other hand, is a framework for ensuring that environmental and sustainability impacts are integrated into high-level government policy, planning and programme making, and provides a systematic process that is aimed at to bringing up-to-date scientific methods to environmental assessments. Major infrastructure projects lie somewhere in between, often have impacts at a wide range of scales, and often visit benefits and adverse impacts unequally to different communities and other stakeholder groups. This paper examines the challenge of optimising geographical and temporal boundaries for the overall framing of infrastructure projects with the objective of minimising the significant adverse impacts and the number of people affected, and maximising the benefits to the greatest number of people. It concludes with comment on how environmental science and technology can help support this process.