Integrating climate considerations into environmental impact assessments: lessons from Latin America and Asia

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is an essential tool in environmental governance, ensuring decision-makers understand a project’s environmental effects before they approve it. Increasingly, EIA is being used as a crucial component of climate mitigation and adaptation efforts.

First introduced under the United States’ National Environmental Policy Act in 1969, EIA is now embedded in more than 180 legal regimes worldwide. Recent Advisory Opinions from international courts have affirmed that EIAs are a core element of states’ due diligence obligations to prevent significant environmental harm, including harm to the climate system. Yet at the domestic level, relatively few EIA laws explicitly reference climate change, and the degree to which climate impacts are considered in practice remains inconsistent.

This report fills a research gap in the Global South by examining EIA regimes in 20 major economies across Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and East, South and Southeast Asia (ESSEA). The authors evaluate whether and how climate change is integrated into these regimes by determining whether proponents must assess a project’s climate change impacts (i.e. mitigation or adaptation-related impacts) across different stages of the EIA process, whether a project’s greenhouse gas emissions are assessed cumulatively, and, where relevant, whether Scope 3 emissions must form part of this emissions assessment. They also provide an overview of the role litigation plays in these countries to clarify or enforce climate assessment obligations where laws are ‘silent’ or weak on the subject.

The analysis finds uneven and often limited integration, with climate concerns frequently treated narrowly and late in decision-making. However, some regimes offer guidance on how climate change can be more comprehensively embedded in impact assessment processes worldwide. Clearer statutory requirements and better technical guidance on climate impact assessments are needed to improve decision-making, reduce legal risk and align project approvals with countries’ national and international climate commitments. International dialogue is also needed, as policymakers, agencies and judges continue to face similar challenges around the world.

Recommendations

The authors make the following recommendations to support legislators, regulators and relevant public authorities, project proponents, project finance providers and judges in aligning EIA regimes, projects and policies with national and international climate commitments:

• Legislators should adopt or amend EIA legislation and implementing regulations to explicitly require assessment of climate impacts.
• Regulators and relevant public authorities should develop detailed regulations and technical guidance that operationalise climate impact assessment across the EIA process.
• Project proponents should seek clarity from competent authorities at the scoping stage of the impact assessment process, where climate assessment obligations are ambiguous.
• Project finance providers should treat climate impact assessment as a core element of environmental and human rights due diligence and require evidence that EIAs address material emissions and climate risks (including, where relevant, indirect emissions and resilience-building measures).
• Judges who are faced with questions about the interpretation of EIA obligations should interpret EIA legislation considering its purpose: to identify, prevent and mitigate environmental impacts before they occur. They should also consider evolving climate-related due diligence standards (including those from overseas courts), ensuring that decision-makers meaningfully consider foreseeable and potentially significant climate impacts.

DOI: 10.21953/researchonline.lse.ac.uk.00137799