An environmental impact assessment is an assessment of the possible positive or negative impact that a proposed project may have on the

environment, together consisting of the natural, social and economic aspects.

The International Association for Impact Assessment (IAIA) defines an environmental impact assessment as "the process of identifying, predicting, evaluating and mitigating the biophysical, social, and other relevant effects of development proposals prior to major decisions being taken and commitments made."

Objectives of EIA is to achieve sustained development with a) Minimal environmental degradation, and b) Prevention of long term environmental adverse effects by incorporating suitable mitigating measures EIA process, therefore, involves the evolution of environmental implications and incorporation of necessary safeguards for those activities having a bearing on environmental quality.

Preliminary activities include the selection of a coordinator for the EIA and the collection of background information. This should be undertaken as soon as a project has been identified. Impact identification involves a broad analysis of the impacts of project activities with a view to identifying those which are worthy of a detailed study. Baseline study entails the collection of detailed information and data on the condition of the project area prior to the project's implementation. Impact evaluation should be done whenever possible in quantitative terms and should include the working-out of potential mitigation measures. Impact evaluation cannot proceed until project alternative has been defined, but should be completed early enough to permit decisions to be made in a timely fashion.

Assessment involves combining environmental losses and gains with economic costs and benefits to procedure a complete account to each project alternative. Cost-benefit analysis should include environmental impacts where these can be evaluated in monetary terms(see Economic Analysis section). Documentation is prepared to described to the work done in the EIA. A working document is prepared to provide clearly stated and argued recommendations for immediate action. The working document should contain a list of project alternative with comments on the environmental and economic impacts of each. Decision-making begins when the working document reaches the decision maker, who will either accept one of the project alternatives, request further study or reject the proposed action altogether. Post audits are made to determine how close to reality the EIA predictions were.

There are various methods available to carry out EIAs, some are industry specific and some general methods:

Industrial products

- Product environmental life cycle analysis (LCA) is used for identifying and measuring the impact on the environment of industrial products. These EIAs consider technological activities used for various stages of the product: extraction of raw material for the product and for ancillary materials and equipment, through the production and use of the product, right up to the disposal of the product, the ancillary equipment and material. Genetically modified plants - There are specific methods available to perform EIAs of genetically modified plants. Some of the methods are GMP-RAM, INOVA etc.

Fuzzy Arithmetic

- EIA methods need specific parameters and variables to be measured to estimate values of impact indicators. However many of the environment impact properties cannot be measured on a scale e.g. landscape quality, lifestyle quality, social acceptance etc. and moreover these indicators are very subjective. Thus to assess the impacts we may need to take the help of information from similar EIAs, expert criteria, sensitivity of affected population etc. To treat this information, which is generally inaccurate, systematically, fuzzy arithmetic and approximate reasoning methods can be utilised. This is called as a fuzzy logic approach.