The pending promises of mitigation measures in Environmental Impact Assessments: A typology and evaluation of Nepal's hydropower projects.

Abstract

Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) are key to infrastructure development globally, and serve to evaluate impacts and guide approval. Importantly, the EIAs typically include mitigation measures through which projects - if allowed to advance - will reduce and mitigate the most negative social and environmental impacts. There are mounting demands to ensure EIA assessments and procedures meaningfully address these impacts, particularly for large-scale, high-risk and long-lived projects such as hydropower infrastructure. We explore these challenges in Nepal, where more than 450 EIAs have been approved since 1997. However, existing EIA evaluations and procedures are widely recognized as failing to deliver on-the-ground. We provide the first public dataset of hydropower projects with approved EIA's, as a basis for characterizing the state of EIA implementation in Nepal. Based on a purposive sample of hydropower EIA reports, we highlight 26 commonly-proposed mitigation measures, and examine the thoroughness of these reports as written. We then also evaluate whether and how these proposed mitigation measures were implemented, based on independent, field-based evaluations of 9 projects, including interviews with field staff and local residents. The results show strong patterns of incomplete and non-compliance EIA reports, particularly as relates to mitigation measures. In the field, we document low levels of implementation of proposed mitigation measures, as well as blatant violations of best practices, and very low rates of government monitoring (~15% of approved projects). We leverage these insights to propose practical advice to strengthen EIAs implementation in Nepal, with broader implications for assessing and mitigating long-lived, high-impact infrastructure projects.