1.Introduction

Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is a mechanism that directs the potential impacts of a certain

project or development to not negatively affect the environment by creating methods and tools of

assessment that identifies or predicts these environmental impacts, Thus allowing decision makers he

opportunity to design alternative activities in the early stages of the design phase.

EIA helps formulate a broader perspective of the impacts of a project or a development regarding its

surrounding environment, allowing for a thorough scoped and well managed projects to take place. EIA

also provides an economic advantage as well by identifying the negative impacts at an early stage of

design and development phase preventing any clean-up costs and preserves time management for the

development or project.

1.1 Methods and tools of the EIA

EIA Methods and tools of assessment Network description A method that uses flow charts to asses es impacts of project activities in 3 categories, Primary, Secondary, and tertiary impacts

Checklist

Geographic Information Systems

A detailed method that uses lists to rapidly identify major impacts Mainly used to identify scale of impact to assess their significance Matrices A table that relates expected project activities and the environmental characteristics by intersecting each column with each row Environmental cartography or map overlay A visual representation in the form of maps that presents main characteristics of the local environment

Graphs and flow charts

Simple cause-effect matrices

A method that corelates chain of events of primary and secondary environmental impacts with the existing project interactions to determine which impacts to be expected A focused or limited type of method that directly relates the affected variables I the local habitat to the manmade activities causes it

Meeting with experts A method of assessment that is useful to implement if the environmental impacts to be studied are specific and limited

1.2 Categories of EIA projects

The scale and specification of projects and developments varies depending on the activities they intend to perform, and their levels of impacts are definitely not the same as well, therefore projects were categorized according to their levels of impacts and this categorization of projects and developments decided on how thorough and detailed the EIA study needs to be

The three levels of categorization are:

White projects: projects that have minimal environmental impact are labelled white; they require a normal environmental screening to be approved.

Grey projects: projects that have some environmental impacts are labelled grey; they may require a scoped EIA study for some activities to be approved.

Black projects: projects that have a detrimental environmental impact are labelled black; they require a full EIA study to be approved.

1.3 Case studies

• Case Study 1:

Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) of Marine Structures in El Sharm El Quible region on the coastal area of the Red Sea

• Case Study 2:

Evaluation of Environmental and social impact assessment (Form B) of Wind power plant in Ras Gharib, Gulf of Suez - Grey project Case study 1: