Strategic Environmental Assessment Framework in Coastal Areas: Designed from a Perspective of Ecosystem Management

摘要

Undefinition of the theoretical basis for strategic environmental assessment (SEA) is a critical problem for its further development. Ecosystem management is firstly presented as the SEA theoretical basis thanks to its essential attributes including the requirements of goals, contents and methodologies; then the eight principles of SEA, i.e., timing, iterative, tiering, and comprehensive, conservation first principle, precautionary principle, cost-benefit analysis, and public participation, are determined under the guidance of the tenets of ecosystem management. Secondly, a generalized SEA framework designed for coastal cities is proposed according to the characteristics of coastal ecosystem and the SEA principles. This framework systematically comprises scoping, environmental baseline assessment, retrospective effect assessment, predictive impact assessment, as well as decision-making support process, and comprehensively considers from environmental factors to socio-economic ones in the full time scales from the past, present to the future. The framework is also designed with the principles of proactive, iterative, interactive and adaptive to the decision-making process. The framework has been applied to various targets in Xiamen China in the past years where the results indicate the proposed SEA framework practicable and effective.