An environmental screening tool for assessment of land use plans covering large geographic areas

Screening methodologies for Strategic Environmental Assessment have been developed for the rapid evaluation of the environmental impact of land use change and infrastructure development plans. To be useful, screening methodologies must be fast, simple and unambiguous. Environmental screening should also be done as early as possible to facilitate integration of the screening into the plan itself. It is difficult in practice to conduct environmental screening for plans covering large geographic areas. Our objective was to develop an environmental screening tool for evaluating very large infrastructure plans. Our approach makes use of Geographic Information System (GIS) tools to develop map-based outputs that can be efficiently incorporated back into the planning processes. We analyzed a region of 500 000 km2, using 15 cartographic layers as a basis for the screening assessment. The final screening tool was easy to use and produced plan evaluations that could easily be understood by all those involved in the planning processes.