Emerging requirements for environmental and social impactassessment in Myanmar'Vicky Bowman, Director, Myanmar Center for Responsible Business

ျမန္မာ့စီးပြားေရးက႑တာ၀န္ယူမႈရိွေရး အေထာက္အကူျပဳဌာန (MCRB) Myanmar Platform for Dialogue on Green Growth, Yangon 24 October 2014

www.mcrb.org.mm

အမွတ္ ၁၅၊ ရွမ္းရိပ္သာလမ္း

(ဆာကူရာ ေဆးရုံအနီး)

စမ္းေခ်ာင္းၿမိ ႔ဳနယ္၊ ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕

ဖုန္း / ဖက္(စ္) ၀၁ ၅၁၀၀၆၉

အလွဴရွင္ အဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ား• ယူေကႏုိင္ငံ၏

ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးမႈဌာန(DFID)

• ေနာ္ေဝအစိုးရ• ဆြစ္ဇာလန္အစိုးရ• ဒိန္းမတအစိုးရ• နယ္သာလန္အစိုးရ• အုိင္ယာလန္

www.myanmar-responsiblebusiness.orgအမွတ္ (၁၅) ရွမ္းရိပ္သာ၊ စမ္းေခ်ာင္းျမိ ႔ဳနယ္၊ရန္ကုန္တုိင္း၊ ျမန္မာ။ဖုန္း၊ ဖက္(စ္) : ၀၁ ၅၁၀၀၆၉

ထူေထာင္သူမ်ား

ပုိ၍တာဝန္ယူမႈရိွေသာ စီပြားေရးအေလ့အက်င့္မ်ားျဖစ္ထြန္းလာေစရန္၊ ႏုိင္ငံတကာအဆင့္အတန္းမ်ား၊ေဒသလုိအပ္ခ်က္မ်ားအေပၚမူတည္၍ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ၌တာဝန္ယူမႈရိွေသာ အသိပညာ၊ စြမ္းေဆာင္ရည္ႏွင့္စကားဝုိင္းမ်ား ျဖစ္ေပၚလာေစရန္အတြက္ ထိေရာက္ေသာတရားဝင္ အခင္းအက်ဥ္းတစ္ခု ပ့ံပုိးေပးရန္။

EIA is a legal procedure in which a project developer is required

to provide environmental information to a consenting body so

that this information can be used for better informed decision

making.

Usually also involves publication and public comment /

disclosure (consultation)

This information is usually provided in an EIA Report (also

called Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), Environmental

Social (Health) Impact Assessment (ES(H)IA) etc).

EIA procedures vary widely from one jurisdiction to another.

EIA is a process and a tool used to

◦ aid decision-making

◦ identify potential environmental impacts of a proposed project

◦ assess how significant (important) these impacts are

◦ recommend appropriate mitigation, management and monitoring measures to

prevent or reduce impacts to acceptable levels

Information gathered during an EIA can feed back into project design

EIA outcomes are typically used to manage subsequent phases of project

design, construction and operation (Environmental Management Plan)

An EIA/EMP should be completed for all significant phases of a project

e.g. Construction, Operation, Closure/decommissioning

Drivers for an EIA:◦ Regulatory – local law requires it

◦ Industry / Corporate – company’s own policies

◦ Financing (e.g. JICA, World Bank, Equator Principles bank)

Context of an EIA:◦ Standards (e.g. emissions, pollutants)

◦ Policies (e.g. land acquisition, resettlement, cultural protection)

Scope of an EIA:◦ Environment

◦ Social

◦ Health

◦ Safety

These are all human rights issues

Prescriptive vs. Guidelines

Performance Standards e.g:◦ “end of pipe” concentration◦ environmental quality standards (e.g.IFC operational

health and safety guidelines)◦ safety performance

Design Standards e.g.:◦ Good International Industry Practice (GIIP)◦ Control and safety systems◦ Design tolerances - e.g. 1 in 100 year wind and waves

‘Procedural’ Standards (e.g. EIA, monitoring, options selection)

Should the project gain regulatory approval?

What are the potential environmental impacts related to the project and are they

being addressed / managed?

Who are the stakeholders and are they being consulted?

Will there be any social / health impacts resulting from the project are they being

addressed / managed?

Will this project damage the Proponent’s or the Government’s reputation?

If money is being sought for the project, are the environmental, health and safety

[EHS] requirements of financing institutions e.g. banks being met?

Are there any safety / risks-to-life for the project and are they being addressed?

What are the risks around closure / decommissioning of facilities?

The 2012 Environmental Conservation Law has given rise to subsequent Regulations, Procedures and administrative Guidelines:

2012 Environmental Conservation Law Article 7 (m): The duties and powers relating to the environmental conservation of the

Ministry are ……..:causing to lay down and carry out a system of environmental impact assessment and social impact assessment as to whether or not a project or activity to be undertaken by any Government department, organization or person may cause a significant impact on the environment;

◦ 2014 Environmental Conservation Rules Environmental Quality Standards – wastewater, noise etc (to be written) Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Procedures (to be adopted as a MOECAF

Notification by end of 2014) – see next slide Environmental Impact Assessment Guidelines

(Draft exists: to be finalized by MOECAF with ADB support)

Scoping Document and Terms of Reference for each individual project EIA: requirements including the necessary studies to undertake and data to be provided

Standard sectoral terms of reference for EIAs e.g. for power stations, oil and gas, mines (potential – these don’t yet exist)

Not yet finalized or adopted.

6th draft 6.6.14

Last ‘public’ consultation was January 2014.

October 2014 – final interministerial consultation

Adoption hoped for by end 2014

Sets out requirements for

◦ EIA (Environmental Impact Assessment) or

◦ IEE (Initial Environmental Examination)

◦ Covers ‘adverse environmental, social, socio-economic, health, occupational safety or health effect suffered or borne by any entity, natural person, or natural resource, including, but not limited to, the environment, flora and fauna, where such effect is attributable in any degree or extent to, or arises in any manner from, any action or omission on the part of the Project Proponent, or from the design, development, construction, implementation, maintenance, operation, or decommissioning of the Project or any activities related thereto’.

Does not explicitly require either a social impact assessment or assessment of human rights impacts (but MOECAF have confirmed social impacts should be addressed, and a single impact assessment is acceptable rather than EIA and SIA)

Includes Annex of sectors/project sizes requiring EIA

Relevant extracts from the 6th draft Annex

Relevant extracts from the 6th draft Annex

2014 SEZ Law:

◦ The management committees are responsible for supervising

environmental conservation and protection in the SEZ in accordance with

the existing laws, scrutinizing the system to dispose industrial waste from

the factories, requesting developers and investors to comply with the

stipulations (ART 11(p));

◦ The investor shall follow the standards and norms contained in the

Myanmar Environmental Conservation Law and international standards and

norms and must prevent social and health impacts in accordance with the

existing laws (ART 35);

◦ The developer or the investor shall not be allowed to significantly modify

or alter the topography or contour of the permitted land without the

permission of the management committee (ART 80(d));

At what points in the EIA process will the project-affected persons, other stakeholders and the public have a chance to be involved and provide input?

Public involvement?

Project affected people (PAP) must

be consultedStakeholder consultation opportunity

Stakeholder consultation opportunity

Green = required public consultation and disclosureOrange = opportunity for companies to consult

Extract from the Draft EIA Guidelines (administrative document)

Stakeholder consultation opportunity

Public involvement?

Public involvement?

Public involvement?

Stakeholder consultation opportunity

Stakeholder consultation opportunity