Improvement Plan Through NONAGREEMENT CONSULTATION Analysis of Small Scale Environmental Impact Assessment

Abstract

Purpose: Small-scale environmental impact assessment means an assessment conducted by surveying, forecasting, and assessing the appropriateness of a site location and the environmental impact to provide ecological conservation measures when it is intended to implement a development project in an area requiring planned development. However, there are many cases of raising problems because of environmental information's lack and uncertainty about ecological issues. Therefore, this study aimed to improve the small-scale environmental impact assessment consultation for the development project by analyzing the reasons for the nonagreement of consultation work, focusing on regulations related to the environment and law. Method: This study analyzed 357 cases notified the result of ‘nonagreement’ consultation of small-scale environmental impact assessments for 9 years from 2012 to 2020. We conducted a one-way ANOVA analysis to determine the differences in the reasons for nonagreement consultation by year, by consulting agency, by project zone, and by project type. Post-hoc analysis was performed by the Scheff test. To conduct statistical analysis, we used Spss Statistics 21 statistical program. Results: The sharp increase in the number of yearly nonagreements in 2018 can be attributed to en-vironmental policy variations following government change in 2017. This increase is because the basis for determining the contents of small-scale environmental impact assessment consultations has become more stringent. We believe that the high rate of nonagreement consultation regarding guidelines and regulations in 2018 and 2019 is also an amendment in environmental policy following the change of government in 2017. The ratio of energy projects was high as the reason for nonagreement consultation by project type. It is believed that this result was inevitable to lead to ‘nonagreement’ because the Ministry of Environment established the ‘Environmental effects evaluation consultation guideline for inland solar power generation’ in 2018 to limit the location of solar power plants. Conclusion: To efficiently operate the small-scale environmental impact assessment and achieve the environmental assessment objectives, the Ministry of Environment should apply the relaxed criteria as a detailed guideline for each area in small-scale environmental impact assessments with small areas. Also, the differences in the analysis results by year and by consulting agency seem to be because most of the consultation workers are public administrative officers, and their working departments were changed according to the interchange of personnel every year. Public officials in charge of consultation are bound to rely on consultation review institutions such as the Korea Environment Institute, the Korea Environment Corporation, the National Institute of Ecology, and the National Institute of Environmental Research. They have no choice but to rely on them. Therefore, we suggest that the officials in charge of consultation should be technical officials rather than administrative officials to improve their professionalism. For efficient operation, frequent personnel transfers of public officials in charge of consultation should also be improved.