Quantification of Ecological Impact as a Basis for Evaluation

독일에서의 환경영향의 정량적 평가

Evaluation methods are employed in environmental impact assessment to choose between different project site, to determine the required measures to compensate impact and to decide whether the environmental impacts are more important than the social or economic effects of a project. The main obstacles that restrict use of quantitative evaluation method are a Lack of knowledge about the environmental effects (e.g. if impacts on wildlife or landscape amenities are predicted) and the relative importance of economic and social issues compared with nature conservation stability of ecosystem or landscape beauty. In Germany, the most common method for site planning is the "ecological risk analysis". It is a kind of multi-criteria-decision-method based on quantitative and qualitative description and ordinal ranking. The various kinds of "ecological balancing methods" that are more recently developed (within the last decade) to quantify the required amount for compensatory measures instead often use cardinal figures to express the value of ecosystems, the intensity of impacts, the need for additional measures to compensate for long recuperative periods when restoring ecosystems and so on. There are still only a view attempts to quantify decisions between environmental and socio-economic issues. Multicriteria-analysis as well as cost-benifit-analysis was used. Some new approaches which are still in a preliminary status are based on contingent valuation and on calculations for compensatory payments (instead of compensatory measures).