What would environmental impact assessment look like if we started from scratch today? Designing better EIA for developed neoliberal nations

After more than five decades of practice, Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) has failed to convince sceptics that it represents value for money. It increasingly overlaps with constantly emerging sustainability requirements. The completed assessments are extremely long, exceed the cognitive capacities of decision makers to assimilate information, cannot address motivated reasoning, and therefore inevitably lead to trade-offs that threaten the very environmental components EIA was designed to protect. In this paper, for the minority of nations with highly developed existing environmental legislation and management only, we propose three radical approaches that include: 1) the adoption of ‘satisficing’, to deliver a streamlined assessment that is good enough; underpinned by 2) better application of ‘acceptable harm rules’ embedded in existing environmental legislation in many jurisdictions to prevent significant harm to environmental media; and 3) an ‘externalities charge’ on developers (irrespective of whether EIA is required) to force more aggressive scoping through market incentives and to fund a shift towards adaptive environmental assessment and management that manages environmental outcomes. Better environmental protections could be delivered using a far more streamlined EIA process, associated with the creation and maintenance of more accurate and comprehensive datasets that can provide better evidence for emerging Artificial Intelligence tools.