Environmental Planning

STOP - You must read Chapter 16 and 17 before doing this lesson

Introduction

Environmental Planning is a systematic process by which goals (policies) are established, facts are gathered and analyzed, alternative are considered, priorities are establish, and recomendations are made designed to achieve the goals.

The protection of the environment can be visualized as having three elements:

What to do (goal and objectives)
How to get it done (programming)
Assessment of the programming (are the objectives and programming correct?)

Planning Premises - these are assumptions, the future setting in which planning and implementation take place. The biggest disadvantage is that all forecast is subjected to a degree of error. Because of this all type of planning have to have a degree of flexibility for changes.

Planning Process

Environmental Planning in
the 21st century is
going to get more complex.

A planning process consists of nine steps:

identify the problem

analyze the problem situation

set a goal - should be broad and attainable

set objectives

develop alternative solutions

test alternatives

select best alternative solution

implement the plant

evaluate the plan

Priority Setting - setting priorities on environmental planning it is a difficult task. A lot of the environmental decisions are made more on the basis of public perception of risk, and political issues than on scientific assessments of risk.

Risk Analysis or risk assessment - it is a qualitative and quantitative process used to evaluate hazardous conditions and to characterize the resulting risk (probability and maganitude of outcomes).
Two aspects of potential environmental problems must be consider in setting risk and priorities:
- Temporal dimension - lenght of time of the problem.
- Spatial dimension - extent of geographical area that is affected.

Determining Alternatice Course
How to do it? How can we prevent environmental problems or diseases? We can used diffferent tools, such as:

Education
Publication of research results
Enforcement of rules and regulations
Economic incentives - they seek to influence but not dictate the actions of the targeted parties.

Assessing Progress in Environmental Planning

Monitoring to assess progress in achieving objectives can be divided into three categories:

Source monitoring - For example, what residual enter or will enter the environment, and in what amount?

Ambient monitoring - For example, what concentrations or residual are present in air, water , soil, or food?

Effects monitoring - For example, what are the consequences of these residual for the environment?

Flexibility in Planning - it is the most important priciple of environmental planning.

Environmental Planning - EPA web site on environmental planning.