Biblio

In Zimbabwe, Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) was legislatively introduced in 2003 through the Environmental Management Act. It relies on an institutional framework that has a supporting administrative and procedural set-up. Given the growing number for the need of EIAs and tightening enforcement regimes that came with the EIA legislation, the environment consultant market has been expanding. However, despite this expansion, EIA is yet to prove its success as a decision support tool in environmental protection. One of the reasons for its ineffectiveness has been in the inadequacies of EIA reports to identify, evaluate and mitigate key environmental impacts caused by development projects. This paper is a review of the works of some randomly selected EIA consultants. EIA reports were critically reviewed to assess compliance with legislation as well as general quality against EIA literature. In addition, interviews with consultants, some project proponents and Environmental Management Agency (EMA) officials were conducted to underpin the quality of EIA reports. Results reveal some gaps that have a bearing on consultants’ practices. The need to enforce inputs from EIA reports to the general planning and project implementation for example is not defined in the legislation. All that is required is for the EIA report to meet set requirements before approval and issuance of license. Inexperience in EIA consultancy, homogeneous qualifications of most practitioners in one team, small team members of practitioners per consultant team, undercharging and pressure from project proponents to ensure they got favourable reports seemed to compromise the quality of reports. As a result inadequacies in areas relating to identification, evaluation and mitigation of key impacts and consideration of alternatives were noted. The paper ends with suggestions on measures for monitoring and capacity building of environmental consultants with the aim of improving the quality of reports and hence making EIA an effective tool in environmental protection.