Purpose of Environmental Assessment Monitoring

• Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) aims to protect the environment by ensuring that a local planning authority has full knowledge of possible significant environmental effects of a proposed development, and mitigation for these, which are taken into account in the decision-making process.
• Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) aims to provide a high level of protection to the environment from development. It is mandatory for plans and/or programmes that relate to large-scale changes in land use.
• Environmental monitoring describes the processes and activities that need to take place in order to characterise and assess the quality of the environment over time.