NEW YORK - Environmental impact assessments are a vital tool to prevent environmental, social, and human rights impacts from projects or activities, but they are being ignored or weakened in many countries globally under the pretext of increasing investment, and causing the opposite effect, a UN expert warned today.
"Environmental impact assessments are mandatory under customary international law, as reiterated by the International Court of Justice. They are a fundamental mechanism for States to assess in advance the potential significant environmental, social, and human rights impacts of projects and to implement effective measures to prevent them," said Astrid Puentes Riaño, the Special Rapporteur on the human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, presenting her latest report to the UN General Assembly.
Amid the worsening crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution, States must assess all potentially harmful activities early and before projects begin, the report said.
Puentes Riaño stressed that these assessments should be properly regulated, cover social and human rights impacts alongside environmental ones, and address all elements of the right to a healthy environment, including climate, biodiversity and clean air. They must follow the principles of prevention, precaution, transparency, equity, and non-discrimination; ensure public participation, access to information and justice; be conducted by independent experts; and include special protections for marginalised groups.
The Special Rapporteur warned that persistent conflicts of interest, the fragmentation of projects to evade comprehensive evaluations, and arbitrary exemptions for sectors such as infrastructure, mining, or energy-including renewables-or treating assessments as a mere formality, are preventing States from properly evaluating projects in advance and thus from avoiding serious impacts, while also undermining their international obligations.
"Exempting projects that may have significant impacts on economic or public interest grounds is having the opposite effect. Numerous severe and irreversible impacts have occurred-causing serious economic, environmental, and human rights consequences-that could have been avoided through comprehensive assessments from the outset, including consideration of possible alternatives," the expert said.
She highlighted that marginalised communities-including Indigenous Peoples, women, children, persons of African descent, rural and coastal communities, and environmental defenders-are often more exposed to the negative impacts of these projects, perpetuating inequality and environmental and climate injustice.
"Instead of further exemptions or deregulation, it is essential that States strengthen environmental, social, and human rights impact assessments to ensure decisions are truly science-based and serve the public interest-including the protection of human rights and nature," the Special Rapporteur said.
