Environmental Policy -
Strategic Environmental Assessment

Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) is a tool for predicting and evaluating the environmental effects of Plans, Programmes and Strategies (PPS). It provides PPS stakeholders with information for making environmentally informed decisions, contributing towards sustainable development.

With the introduction of the Environmental Assessment (Scotland) Act (2005) in February 2006, all Scottish PPS likely to have significant environmental effects require an SEA by law. When fully integrated with PPS-development, SEA can contribute to the avoidance or reduction of negative and the enhancement of positive environmental effects of PPS.

SEA also has significant institutional benefits which are becoming more widely acknowledged and developed. These include increased inter-departmental and institutional joint-working and improved adopted PPS.

EnviroCentre's Environmental Policy staff have been invloved in a wide range of projects most notably working on the Scottish Govervenments SEA Pathfinder project examining emerging Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) practice in Scotland with a view to informing and shaping future SEA policy in Scotland. A preview preview of an article on the project for 'the environmentalist' can be found here.

Services Include:

• Development of SEA implementation frameworks;
  
• Capacity-building and training;
  
• SEA Quality Review and independent verification;
  
• Technical aspects of environmental assessment;
  
• State of Environment Reporting;
  
• Collation of environmental baseline information;
  
• Public participation, consultation and facilitation of stakeholder engagement;
  
• Environmental policy development and implementation.