Geospatial and Environmental Impact Assessment

 

Geospatial and Environmental Impact Assessment

 

The environment system has a very close relationship between human beings and nature which is pretty complex.

When there is a change in one thing, it inevitably affects the other thing. Similarly, every development activity will

always bring a new change to the environment. Moreover, any kind of development that ignores the deterioration

impacts will affect people’s livelihood, economics, and society. However, geospatial will help reveal a clearer

picture of the impact to make decisions based on data

 

Assessing the environmental impact

 

The Environmental Impact Assessment (EA) aims are conservation and environmental management. By assessing the development impact of the project that will affect the environment on good and bad sides as well as the risk that will affect the ecosystem integrity, leading to a fatal natural disaster.

Environmental Impact Assessment may be defined as "A process for identifying, predicting, evaluating and

mitigating the biological, social, and other relevant impacts on any development proposal before a decision can be made." It is guaranteed that decision-makers have carefully considered the impact of development projects on the environment. Before approval, the project should be undertaken by the person requesting permission.

The advantage of ELA is to help find prevention from environmental impact to mitigate it as least as possible.

Meanwhile, there's also usage of natural resources that mostly cannot be returned. Moreover, the analytic

report on environmental impact can also be a tool to help the management team decide what the project should

be undergoing. Therefore, EIA is very beneficial if there are prevention plans during the learning process on the project which will help reduce additional expenses after the project started. It also helps track environmental impact as an important part of the report.

 

 

Geo-informatics and the support for environmental impact assessment

Geo-informatics is a supporting tool to manage spatial data analysis based on the data from GIS that has

identified positions on the satellite images and drone images. This is for an accurate position and correct updated

information before taking it to analysis on the environmental impacts such as house location, forest, and community areas, water areas, and so on.

 

The geo-informatics data can make us see a clearer picture of the project's environmental impact as it can

analyze and make statistics out of the impact itself such as the capacity of agricultural area, household numbers,

water area zones, which could be potential to get affected by the project.

 

Currently, online mapping technology plays an important part in helping to increase awareness of the impact on

nearby communities. By publishing project data and assessing data through websites or online maps, it shows

the boundary of the situation for to visualize and build mutual understanding between projects and communities.

Even phone locator technology is part of geo-informatics that can help connect project spatial information with

people in affected areas through an online mapping system, which can be applied as a means of communication

between the project and the local public sector for smartphone commenting or to help modernize the project's

spatial database.

 

After all, the data will eventually show up on an online map with accurate positions such as the position of people's comment and satellite image that shows the area's weakness. This raises more understanding for a person in charge of the project areas. On the other hand, people also can understand better the development of the project. All of this is integrated between the person in charge of the project and the people that live in the area. The limitations of geo-informatics in terms of environmental assessment and data with insufficient quality such as inconsistent data scale, out of date, and different data collection standards can result in inaccurate assessment results, as geo-informatics data needs to assess environmental impacts that comes from a variety of local sources that are expected to get the impact.

 

Each of the departments in the local area has different standards of data storage such as the data of household

numbers that are kept in the form of GIS but the data is migrated on a different scale as some areas use satellite

images that were captured in high-profile to get accurate location, and some areas have an out-of-date satellite image so they need to estimate the location or draw a map by hand. This causes inconsistencies when

analyzed in conjunction with data from other areas.

 

The modernization of the data is also important because changes in each habitat are usually happening almost

daily, such as the increasing number of roads and houses. Agricultural land that has been changed to other types of areas, for example, may cause the results of the analysis not to cover the current reality, if the data

of the house, location is updated in 2020 to study the impact of building new roads in 2022 so that homes built-in

such areas after 2020 may fall short of appearing in the report.

 

In summary, geo-informatics technology help increase the process efficiency of conducting environmental impact

assessments. Not only is the spatial analysis and spatial data management support involved in various development projects, but also the development of communication processes, which is important in engaging stakeholders and operators in terms of the environmental impact assessment process. This help reduces the gap and increase participation and most importantly, enhancing the process of decision-making that will happen from the development in various dimensions towards people and environment to be standardized on real data.

 

Reference

Environmental Impact Assessment by Office of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy and Planning

Accessed by onep.go.th

 

Changwat Arunrattana, Utilization of geo-informatics technology with environmental impact assessment

Department of Water Resources accessed by dwr.go.th

 

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