Planners’ views on cumulative effects. A focus-group study concerning transport infrastructure planning in Sweden
Highlights
► The term cumulative effects is little known among infrastructure planners in Sweden. ► We suggest means to enhance CE treatment in EIA/SEA in road and rail planning. ► CE should be assessed in relation to local or project environmental objectives. ► CE should be used in determining the significance of environmental impacts. ► Requirements on CE assessment should be included in EIA/SEA procurement.
Introduction
Cumulative effects (CE) attract increasing interest in infrastructure and land-use planning worldwide. Assessment of CE is potentially an efficient means to grasp the multitude of environmental effects when an activity in a landscape is being planned. According to Glasson et al. (2008), however, there is no consensus on what constitutes CE (or Cumulative Impacts, CI, as an alternative term). They, for instance, refer to the five categories of CE, namely time-crowded perturbations, space-crowded perturbations, synergisms, indirect effects and nibbling, presented by Peterson et al. (1987). The “tyranny of small decisions” (Odum, 1982) is another concept that, in our view, pinpoints the very core of CE—small projects individually may not pose a great problem to the environment but when enough of them has been built, the collective impact on the environment may be huge. A much used definition of CE is “changes to the environment caused by an action in combination with other past, present and reasonably foreseeable future actions” (Council on Environmental Quality, 1997). This is the definition we will be using in the present article.
Assessment of CE has long been practiced in Canada and USA where procedures are legally formalized under the term Cumulative Effects Assessment (CEA) and incorporated in the procedures of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) (Canter and Ross, 2010). In spite of assessment of CE being demanded by the European so-called EIA Directive (Council of the European Communities, 1985, Council of the European Union, 1997) and the SEA Directive (Council of the European Parliament, 2001), little attention has hitherto been paid to CE in the Swedish road and railway infrastructure planning practice. Rather, CE assessment is largely lacking in Swedish EIA and SEA documents, and a range of obstacles for inclusion of CE issues have been identified (de Jong et al., 2004, Wärnbäck, 2007). Likewise, a lack of knowledge on CE and of incentives to include CE in EIA and SEA work has been documented for Swedish infrastructure and land-use planning (Oscarsson, 2006, Wärnbäck and Hilding-Rydevik, 2009). Besides, the Swedish research in the CE field has so far mainly had a “from outside” perspective focusing “if and how” CE works. Contrary to Sweden, recent Canadian studies, such as Gunn and Noble (2011) and Noble et al. (2011), have investigated professional planners’ and practitioners’ perspectives of CE work and its relationship with SEA. Seeking the professional planner's views on actions and measures to make CE assessment more effective is therefore the focus of the present article. Such a focus on the professionals’ views that stem from their daily planning practice makes this issue interesting in a broader context of planning research also outside Sweden.
The present article explores possibilities to improve the handling of CE in the EIA and SEA work connected to the Swedish road and railway planning processes. The study has been guided by the hypothesis that improvement suggestions can be retrieved from the professional experience of planners active in different roles in the planning process. The article presents results from a qualitative focus-group study involving professionals with experience from the Swedish EIA and SEA processes for road and rail infrastructure planning and, to a smaller degree, spatial planning. The aims of the study were:
- (1)
to analyse views of cumulative effects held by professionals with long planning practice;
- (2)
to analyse how these planners experience the handling of CE in their daily planning practice;
- (3)
to identify means to strengthen the assessment of CE in the Swedish road and railway infrastructure planning process.
We start out with making a brief review of the concept of CE based on the literature. After presenting the results of the focus-group study we discuss the results in the light of previous research on treatment of CE. Finally, we suggest some improvements to strengthen CE assessment in the Swedish EIA/SEA processes and identify some needs for further research.
Section snippets
Literature review
In the vast international literature on CE, frequent themes include science as a basis for CEA work, level of ambition, methodology (inclusive of scales), process (inclusive of follow-up), Valued Ecosystem Components, information sharing, public and stakeholder participation, and competence and education.
CEA practice has been criticized for not being sufficiently based in CEA science. As an example, spatial planning in western Canada is considered to be little influenced by science (Schindler
Transport infrastructure planning and CE legislation in Sweden
According to the Swedish Roads Act (SFS, 1971) and the Railway Construction Act (SFS, 1995), the planning process for the building of roads and railroads comprises four steps: Preliminary Study, Feasibility Study, Detailed Design Plan and Route Construction Plan. Public participation in EIA is regulated by the Environmental Code (SFS, 1998b). Early in the process, the developer conducts an early consultation with the reviewer, i.e. the County Administrative Board (CAB), and people directly
Method
The study was based on information retrieval using focus groups (Patton, 1990, Wibeck, 2000). Focus-group inquiry is a form of group interview where one of the major advantages is interactive discussion among the participants. According to Morgan (1998) the methodology is suitable in order to understand differences among the participants concerning their views and actions taken in their daily planning practice.
For the focus groups, targeted participants were to be sought among professionals
Conception of cumulative effects
Already the written replies to the question “What do you think of when you hear the term cumulative effects?” revealed vague views of the meaning of the term. All but one of the fourteen respondents more or less explicitly mentioned aggregated effects. Half of the respondents mentioned different types of effects, and some of them explicitly mentioned effects of different projects or measures. Nine respondents thought of a project giving rise to different effects. Four people pointed out that
Discussion
Swedish research has hitherto not put much effort into seeking the professional planner's views on actions to make CE assessment more effective. This is what we do in the present study. Possibly mirroring limited acquaintance with “cumulative effects”, the focus-group discussions more concerned EIA/SEA as a whole than CE specifically. However, the discussions revealed many views that effectively contributed to attaining the three aims of our study concerning (i) planners’ conception of CE, (ii)
Conclusions
The lack of common understanding of the term CE poses a problem not only in potentially causing confusion among actors. Also, the direction and focus of the CE assessment process run the risk of being arbitrarily steered by conceptions held by the individual actor. There is much room for improvement to the guidance on CE assessment in Swedish EIA and SEA handbooks. Another pathway would be to modernize the Swedish EIA and SEA legislation based on state-of-the-art knowledge and state of the
Role of the funding source
The project was part of the research programme Integration of ecological and cultural dimensions in transport infrastructure (INCLUDE) funded by the Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research, the Swedish Road Administration, the Swedish Rail Administration, the Swedish National Heritage Board and the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. The project was partly funded also by the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute and the Royal Institute of Technology. Funders had no
Acknowledgments
This work was performed partly within the framework of the research programme “Integration of ecological and cultural dimensions in transport infrastructure” (INCLUDE) funded by the Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research, the Swedish Road Administration, the Swedish Rail Administration, the Swedish National Heritage Board and the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. The project was partly funded also by the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute and the Royal
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