The Irish Rural Environmental Protection Scheme and lack of Strategic Environmental Assessment

Abstract

Proposals specifically aimed at delivering environmental benefits are often exempt from assessment, despite evidence that they can be poorly thought-through and sometimes counterproductive. This is doubly true of agri-environmental schemes where local farm-scale actions are expected to generate large-area cumulative effects on soil and water quality, biodiversity or landscape. There is evidence that the benefits of such schemes have often been assumed rather than planned for, thus necessitating ex-post assessment to justify their continuance.