Rapid environmental assessment tool for the extended Berlin geothermal field project

Abstract

Environamental Impact Assessment (EIA) is a tool used in the planning of development strategies and projects, and its use has been adopted into planning regulations in El Salvador. The historical development of EIA shows that a number of attemps have been made to improve the quality of the EIA analysis by seeking to improve the accuracy of the judgement, resulting in a number of formats being developed for EIA analyses in. In any the judgements will be subjetive, either in whole or in part. This is a consequence of many factors: the lack or inadequacy of baseline data, the time frame provided for data adquisition and analysis, the terms of reference provided for the EIA, and the capacity of the assessors to cover a wide range of issues. Even where quantitative environmental data is available, the overall use of this data requires a subjetive judgement of thepossible impact, its spatial scale and potencial magnitude A new method for EIA to allow subjetive judgements to be quantitatively record, thus providing both impact evaluation and a record that can be re-assessed with the passage on time, is the Rapid Impact Assessment Matrix (RIAM), which is applied in the Extended Berlin Geothermal Field Project. Gethermal development experts successfully applied this method making theenviromental assessment easy and rapid with economical benefits for the company. It even resulted in an easy process for environmental legal evaluators.