Environmental impact assessment for hydroelectric power plants in Trentino (Italy) 1990-1997: similarity and clustering of studies, sites and projects

Characterizing environmental impact statements for road projects in North Carolina, USA

“…This contrasts with the cluster analysis used by Daini (2000), which seeks to divide the EISs (the individual observations) into groups based on the values of the variables for each study. Here the three categories of variable from EISs serve as the group for CCA.…”

“…He concludes that this type of study would be a great tool to formulate or improve guidelines for future development projects. Our study builds on Daini's (2000) approach by focusing on the transportation sector in the USA and applying two different methods of multivariate analysis.…”

“…The only section that showed significant differences was impact assessment, and these results suggest non-standard treatment of environmental impacts within the same region. Daini (2000) recommends close study of particular economic sectors to find any relationship between the elements of an EIS and its quality. He concludes that this type of study would be a great tool to formulate or improve guidelines for future development projects.…”

“…However, this subjective scoring system depends on the evaluators' criteria and expectations. Daini (2000) uses cluster analysis to find similarities in data structure from EISs for hydroelectric projects in the Trentino region of Italy. He finds that two out of three sections of EISs were treated consistently: project site information and environmental baseline information.…”

“…For example, Atkinson et al (2000), studying treatment of biodiversity impacts in a sample of draft EISs, find inconsistencies and inadequacies in the documentation. These authors and others call for more systematic analyses of EISs to identify the patterns and explore possible reasons for these inconsistencies (Daini, 2000).…”