Combining Scientific Facts and Significance Criteria to Predict the Result of an Environmental Impact Assessment Review

Abstract

The purpose of determining impact significance is to place value on impacts. Environmental impact assessment review is a process that judges whether impact significance is acceptable or not in accordance with the scientific facts regarding environmental, ecological and socio-economical impacts described in environmental impact statements or environmental impact assessment reports. The first aim of this paper is to summarize the criteria of significance evaluation from the past review results and accordingly utilize fuzzy rule-based system to incorporate these criteria into scientific facts. The second aim is to employ data mining technique to construct an environmental impact statement or environmental impact assessment report prediction model for reviewing results which can assist developers to prepare and revise better environmental management plans in advance. The validity of the previous prediction model proposed by authors in 2009 is 92.7%. The enhanced validity in this study can attain 100.0% after taking significance criteria into account. In the case study, some indicators are over-standard in first and second-order significance but all indicators ultimately fall into the category of conditional approval in third-order significance.

Keywords: environmental impact assessment review, impact significance, fuzzy rule-based system, data mining, classification tree