Tiering biodiversity issues from strategic environmental assessment to environmental impact assessment: exploring documentary evidence from Brazil and England

Biodiversity protection is one of the key goals for Environmental Assessment (EA) practice that can most efficiently be achieved through tiering of environmental objectives between Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) of sectoral and land use plans and Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) of projects. This research uses an analytical framework to benchmark some examples of tiering of biodiversity objectives using documentary case studies from Brazil and the United Kingdom; these suggest that EA tiering might still be very limited despite all recommendations to improve it, thereby impacting on the efficiency with which biodiversity goals can be achieved.