Improving environmental assessment efficiency by streamlining EIS content: understanding stakeholder views and motivations

The Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) is a key component and important output of the environmental assessment (EA) process. The typically voluminous nature of these documents has often been highlighted, however, including a tendency to contain information that is not clearly relevant to or used in the assessment or associated decision-making. Streamlining EISs to reduce extraneous content may therefore be a way to enhance EA efficiency while also making information more accessible and meaningful for participants – but there has been little consideration of stakeholders’ views and preferences on this matter. Through a survey of stakeholders that have participated in EAs in Atlantic Canada, this study investigates whether there is a perceived need and opportunity to streamline EIS content in practice. While there was overall interest in reducing EIS page counts, respondents generally did not support scoping out issues or information due to a perceived need to still evaluate seemingly well-understood effects and standard mitigation in a project-specific context, and given diverse stakeholder needs and backgrounds. Rather, they emphasized the need for improved information quality and saw opportunities to gain efficiency through increased specificity, clearer connections between evidence and conclusions, and improved presentation of EA information.