ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT ASSESSMENT

APPLYING A CONSISTENT APPROACH

One important element of our work involves co-ordination of robust environmental impact assessments (EIAs) for major developments.

For the more complex developments, such as regional scale waste infrastructure, large windfarm, agrifood or housing led expansions, this involves managing a large and wide ranging professional team spanning across the full spectrum of environmental disciplines.

Over the past year we have been kept busy drafting EIA chapters and reviewing consultant inputs in co-ordinating EIAs for new major applications as well as with refreshing or consolidating EIA submissions given the passage of time that some applications have been under consideration by the respective Councils or the Department for Infrastructure.

It is critical to recognise where the potential risks lie and minimise any EIA grounds of challenge. This includes the age of baseline survey information that is being relied upon or compliance with the EIA regulations, such as addressing all the relevant matters for inclusion or simply ensuring that the information once submitted has been advertised correctly.

The focus of our approach to coordinating EIAs is to apply consistency. The importance of information sharing across the various environmental disciplines that form part of the EIA is key to ensuring that all potential impacts and inter-relationships are considered robustly. This can often include a legal review to further reinforce the robustness of the EIA content and protect our client and ultimately the decision maker to take approve applications with confidence.

Recent Clyde Shanks EIA work extends across a wide array of planning applications and includes:

• Further Environmental Information (FEI) in respect of reserved matters submission for 700+ dwellings, local centre and parkland at Ballyclare for Neptune Group

• Further Environmental information submission in respect of Residual Waste project for Indaver/arc21 at Hightown Quarry, Mallusk

• co-ordination and submission of an EIA for a new pig (6,200 finishers) farm near Kells

• submission of a consolidated EIA for an amended 8 turbine 33.6 MW wind farm proposal near Hilltown for ABO Wind NI

• FEI for a 4.1MW Anerobic Digestion (AD) facility for Energia, Belfast Harbour, and

• FEIs for major mixed use neighbourhood (1300 dwellings and 750,000 sq. ft. employments uses) and 1.8km link road on lands at Blaris connecting Sprucefield to the Moira Road; Neptune Carleton LLP