Environmental impact assessment in South Africa - what difference can a sustainability assessment make?
type: CreativeWork
description: Sustainability is a concept that has the objective of dealing with the immediate and future 'needs' of society while attempting to take the 'limitations' imposed by the ecological damage into account. The term sustainability is an ambiguous one which then allows it to be interpreted in many different ways. The needs of society, which change over time, are governed by the intra- and inter-generational equity aspect of sustainability. The assessment of the ecological aspect of sustainability is a snap-shot image based on the situation prevailing when the assessment is undertaken whilst having to take the dynamic nature of sustainability into account. Assessing the sustainability of a development then places both an immediate and future-based limitation on it. This study had the prime objective of defining a method of including the sustainability related aspects into the task of environmental assessment. A comprehensive study of the literature yielded a developing attitude of making use of the applied scientific principles in the assessment process. There is a notion that the assessment of the environment should form part of the paradigm of engineering science so that the application of the scientific principles will be allowed to influence the decision making resulting from an assessment. There is a school of thought in the literature that advocates the use of system based procedures to the definition of the environment being assessed. The use of engineering based processes in conjunction with the system based definition allows the unencumbered application of the integrated environmental management procedures to achieve the goal of assessing sustainability. Subsequent to the literature study and the resulting discussion and debate of the prescriptions contained in the literature, a system based model to allow the spatial and temporal aspects of sustainability to be included in the definition of an assessment has been described. The operation of this model has been dis…
abstract: Sustainability is a concept that has the objective of dealing with the immediate and future 'needs' of society while attempting to take the 'limitations' imposed by the ecological damage into account. The term sustainability is an ambiguous one which then allows it to be interpreted in many different ways. The needs of society, which change over time, are governed by the intra- and inter-generational equity aspect of sustainability. The assessment of the ecological aspect of sustainability is a snap-shot image based on the situation prevailing when the assessment is undertaken whilst having to take the dynamic nature of sustainability into account. Assessing the sustainability of a development then places both an immediate and future-based limitation on it. This study had the prime objective of defining a method of including the sustainability related aspects into the task of environmental assessment. A comprehensive study of the literature yielded a developing attitude of making use of the applied scientific principles in the assessment process. There is a notion that the assessment of the environment should form part of the paradigm of engineering science so that the application of the scientific principles will be allowed to influence the decision making resulting from an assessment. There is a school of thought in the literature that advocates the use of system based procedures to the definition of the environment being assessed. The use of engineering based processes in conjunction with the system based definition allows the unencumbered application of the integrated environmental management procedures to achieve the goal of assessing sustainability. Subsequent to the literature study and the resulting discussion and debate of the prescriptions contained in the literature, a system based model to allow the spatial and temporal aspects of sustainability to be included in the definition of an assessment has been described. The operation of this model has been dis…
author: Hearn, A.M.
language: en
keywords: Sustainability, environmental impact assessment, engineering methods, artificial intelligence, system and system based, sustainability assessment
date published: 2018
date modified: 2026-07-24T03:33:37Z
provider: North-West University (South Africa)
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: North-West University

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/10394/31247