Roads, the environment and the need for environmental assessment

The Swazi Environment Page, Times of Swaziland July 31 1999

There is a growing awareness that road development has major environmental impacts. Some of the major environmental impacts of road projects include damage to sensitive ecosystems, loss of productive agricultural lands, resettlement of affected communities, permanent disruption of local economic activities, demographic changes, accelerated urbanisation and the introduction of disease.

Road projects are generally intended to improve the economic and social welfare of people. Increased road capacity and improved pavements can reduce travel times and lower the costs of vehicle use, while increasing access to markets, jobs, education and health services and reducing transport costs for both freight and passengers.

Impacts

For all the positive aspects of road projects, they may also have significant negative impacts on nearby communities and the natural environment. People and properties may be in the direct path of road works and affected in a major way. People may also be indirectly affected by road projects, through the disruption of livelihood, loss of accustomed travel paths and community linkages, increases in respiratory problems due to air pollution, loss of access to resource products (medicinal plants, wild fruit trees, grazing areas for cattle etc.) and injury from road accidents.

Disturbance to the natural environment may include soil erosion, changes to streams and underground water, and interference with animal and plant life. Temporary impacts during construction are also common and require specific mitigation to minimise them, e.g. keeping dust levels down during road pavement preparation through the use of water bowsers to minimise health and safety impacts to nearby communities.

Roads bring people, and people bring development. New roads may induce development in previously undeveloped areas, sometimes significantly affecting sensitive environments and the life style of indigenous people. Roads are agents of change and can be responsible for both benefits and damage to the existing balance between people and their environment.

Mitigation Measures

All these concerns will seldom arise from one road project, but it is common to find at least some of them even in relatively minor road works like rehabilitation or re-surfacing works. Much can be done to avoid, mitigate or compensate for the negative environmental impacts of a road project, but it is important to identify potential impacts early in the road planning process and to make provisions for avoiding or mitigating these effects wherever possible.

Failure to identify potential impacts may result in delays and cost increases later in the project's development. Neglecting to account for impacts may also cause the road designers to adopt solutions that compromise the environment. Poor environmental management has been shown to produce negative public perception of road projects, creating additional for those projects still to come.

Sustainability

A truly sustainable approach to road transport calls for a substantial change in attitude towards the environment as it relates to the preparation and management of road projects. Costs of the indirect effects of pollution and disruption must be examined. Changes to the health, social and cultural well-being of communities, and impacts on the biophysical environment and on biodiversity, must be considered. The needs of the poor and of future generations need to be taken into account.

Legislation and the Swaziland Environment Authority (SEA)

The change in attitude towards the environment in Swaziland is being driven by national environmental legislation. The Environmental Audit, Review and Assessment Regulations (1996) produced by the Swaziland Environment Authority (SEA) makes it compulsory for all projects, including roads, to systematically assess the likely impacts a particular project will have on the environment and to find ways of avoiding, mitigating or compensating for the likely impacts. This process is generally called an Environmental Assessment (EA).

Environmental Assessment (EA)

An EA is not aimed solely at identifying the negative impacts of a project in the context of the area it is being planned in, but also optimises the positive effects of the project. Project management should be organised so that environmental matters are considered, gathered, analysed, and weighed and have a timely influence on the planning, budget and design of the road project.

Just as good road project planning, management and execution requires well trained professional transportation engineers, technically credible and environmentally sensitive, road EA's require experienced environmental professionals supporting the engineering team. Such personnel should be brought into the project development process at a very early stage.

EA practitioners are by no means the only set of participants in the EA process. Representatives of the project proponents, government agencies, NGO's, research groups and community organisations, as well as any others whose input is desired in both project development and EA processes, are all needed to ensure that their concerns and expertise are fully integrated into the project planning processes.

New versus existing project types

When planning and executing Environmental Assessments (EA's) for new road and road rehabilitation projects, proponents need to be aware that the impacts associated with these two project types are significantly different. For new projects the focus is on preventing impacts, whereas for existing or upgrade projects, the focus is on rehabilitation of prior environmental damage and mitigating further impacts. Rehabilitation of post-development damage to a pre-development state is not needed. Rather, at the very least, the degradation should be halted and the environment not subjected to significant new negative impacts.

Rural versus urban type projects

It is important to distinguish between projects proposed for mainly rural settings versus those planned for urbanised areas. Road developments in these two environments present significantly different problems. In the rural setting, the key impacts usually revolve around removal of productive agricultural land and the opening up of previously inaccessible, or marginally inaccessible, territory to in-migration and resource harvesting. Furthermore, because rural life is so closely integrated with the biophysical aspects of the environment, issues such as water quality, noise, loss of natural resources, health, safety and biodiversity conservation deserve special consideration.

In the urban setting, where population densities are higher and the connection to the biophysical environment is less significant, the dominant issues have to do with displacement of communities/people and their homes, general neighbourhood disruption, noise, compensation and security.

Consultation

Consultation is important for both urban and rural location. It enables road project proponents to identify potential impacts as well as local sources of information and knowledge, to highlight community concerns about the effects of road changes on lifestyles and welfare, and to encourage public participation in the development of workable solutions.

The "mixed" rural-urban project

In reality, most rural road projects are actually a mixture of rural and urban sections, since rural roads do not simply stop in the countryside but traverse, or end in, urban areas. If the urban areas at the end of the road are in fact an integral part of the project they should be included in any EA. For various practical reasons, however, urban areas are often excluded from projects. This is unfortunate as later there may be traffic problems which are the result of a larger capacity road feeding into a lower capacity urban arterial (congestion, road safety, restricted access, etc.) which requires remedial actions that are far more costlier than earlier, preventative measures would have been, provided there had been a thorough examination of these urban nodes.

A recent example of this sort of problem in Swaziland is the identification for the need to upgrade the By-pass Road within Mbabane to cater for the expected increase in traffic generated by the increased capacity of the new Mbabane-Ngwenya road (MR3). A similar problem exists in Manzini, where traffic from Matsapha flowing into Manzini from the dual carriageway becomes congested within Manzini itself.

There are many cases where it is desirable to include all urban sections in a road project through which a road passes and in which it ends.

EA and road project development

A growing number of development planners and managers now recognise that EA is an excellent preventative planning tool, provided it is implemented early in the project development sequence. EA's generally have three objectives:

To present managers and decision makers with a clear assessment of potential impacts which a project may have on the overall environment
To apply to a project a methodology which assesses and predicts impacts and provides (a) the means for impact prevention and mitigation, (b) the enhancement of project benefits, and (c) the minimisation of long-term impacts
To provide a specific forum in which consultation is systematically undertaken in a manner that allows stakeholders to have a direct input to the environmental management process.

EA is a legal requirement in Swaziland for all large construction projects and should therefore be provided for from the outset in the budget and planning of all road projects.

EA duration and budget

Among the factors to be considered before beginning an EA is the time devoted to the study and the budget for preparing the study. Broadly speaking, the duration of an EA is usually between six and eighteen months and expenses range between five and ten percent of project preparation costs. In a World Bank review of EA's completed between 1992 and 1995, it was found that EA's accounted for 0.06% to 0.45% of the total project cost. An EA begun late in the project (at the end of design stage for instance) may cause delays and exceed the suggested time range. The budget and timeline expenditures for less extensive environmental analysis (i.e. an Initial Environmental Evaluation), are well below these levels with studies taking between six to twelve weeks and costing about 0.02% to 0.1% of total project costs.

The cost of mitigation, i.e. physical and social measures, can cost between two and ten percent of total project costs but can be higher in urban or sensitive locations.

Planning remedial measures

Avoidance of negative environmental impacts should be the proponents priority. What can realistically be achieved often depends on the location and scale of road works and related off-site construction and traffic activities. Impacts can be avoided completely by a "no project" option, but it should be recognised that even existing roads have impacts on their surrounding environment. These impacts can increase over time with traffic growth and land development.

Mitigation

Mitigation is the lessening of negative environmental impacts through: (a) changes in the design, construction practices, maintenance, and operation of the road; and (b) additional actions taken to protect the biophysical and social environment, as well as the individuals who have been impacted adversely by a project. Some aspects of mitigation can be incorporated into project design and can largely resolve the threat of impacts before construction begins. However many measures require a ongoing implementation plan to ensure that proposed actions are carried out at the correct times, that environmental measures such as grass planting and slope protection are maintained and that prompt remedial actions are taken when the initial measures are not fully successful. The principle of "no net loss" is a useful guideline for the design of remedial measures, especially those involving people.

Compensation

Compensation should be considered if steps to reduce impacts are not possible or sufficient. Compensation can be material (reconstruction of homes or natural environment), financial (compensation for loss of property), or a combination of both.

Monitoring

The implementation of mitigative measures is often the weakest link in the environmental management process. Any EA study needs to identify plans for works supervisors (design and supervising engineers), future environmental monitoring and evaluation studies. Once implemented these should ensure the full implementation of the mitigation measures.

During construction, all mitigative measures designed to reduce the impact of the construction activities should be monitored and enforced by independent environmental monitoring authorities. Ideally this should be undertaken by a third party as self-monitoring by the contractor is a recipe for non-compliance and money saving. Project supervisors have also been known to turn a blind eye to non-compliance allowing the contractor, whom he is supervising on behalf of the proponent, to not fully implement the mitigation measures called for in the mitigation plan. A common example is the rehabilitation of areas disturbed during construction. How many readers have noticed large areas of bare eroding land on which once stood the contractors site offices or construction activities? Or road embankments ungrassed and rapidly eroding? Failure to rehabilitate, followed by failure to enforce, is a serious problem along all roads in Swaziland.

Implementation of environmental requirements

Environmental requirements left as statements in an EA will rarely be fully implemented. Implementation of environmental requirements can be ensured by either attaching the EA report as a legal condition to all contract documents or by preparing a set of environmental clauses to be placed directly into the contract documentation.

Each environmental clause should contain at least four pieces of information specifying:

What needs to be done, where it needs to be done, when and how the action will take place, and who is responsible. The overriding characteristic of an environmental clause should be that it is prescriptive, precisely defining what needs to be done and what the deadline is, leaving little room for misinterpretation.

Finally, the usefulness of environmental clauses in contracts will only be as good as the technical capacity and environmental sensitivity of the people assigned to implement the actions. Therefore, an investigation of the contractors' and supervising consultants' past environmental record and experience is an essential step towards environmentally-sound project management.

Conclusion

The requirement for environmental impact assessments for road projects in Swaziland has been a legal requirement since May 1996. The Ministry of Public Works and Transport, the responsible authority for the construction and maintenance of all our roads, has since that time, been undertaking EA's for most of their road projects. The lack of a transportation policy to guide road development and a lack of commitment to fully exploiting the EA process for a better managed development has been a weakness of the Ministry. Environmental professionals are viewed as trouble-makers by most contractors and their supervising engineers, due in part to the often late involvement of the EA process in the overall project which results in delays and additional costs that were never taken into account in the project design. Poor organisational management on their part is often then blamed on the environmental team for delaying a project or increasing its costs.

Take the new Ngwenya-Mbabane road. Much has been said in the press over the tendering procedure to appoint a contractor for the works, yet nothing is mentioned about the totally inadequate environmental impact assessment and unusable and very costly mitigation plan that has been done for that project. This project will no doubt be delayed by the need to correct the EA and its mitigation plan and the "environmentalists" will be blamed for the delay. Yet all this could have been avoided by following an EA process with consultation and the involvement of specialists.

Stricter monitoring of compliance is needed if road projects are to achieve the long term aims of the National Development Strategy - sustainable economic development. Where is the sense in constructing multi-million Emalangeni roads if the negative environmental impacts have to borne by the affected communities, users and eventually central government to rehabilitate, at their own expense, the mistakes of the designers and contractors?

It is essential that the Ministry establish an environmental unit within the Roads Department to manage the overall EA process by drafting terms of reference for the EA studies; assembling teams for conducting EA's; ensuring internal co-ordination with the Roads Department; negotiating with other line ministries and establishing supervisory authority; organising public consultations; implementing mitigation plans; drafting special environmental clauses for road contracts and for organising training and information campaigns.

Environmental skills training is required for members of such a unit to provide technical input into the project process. International funding agencies are very supportive of national efforts to enhance institutional capacities associated with environmental management.

All is not lost, however, environmental management processes are slowly making their way into road projects in Swaziland and over the next few years its importance in sustainable development will be recognised and the country will have a road network befitting the scenic splendour of the kingdom.

This page was last updated on 05 November 2001