1. Emerging requirements for environmental and social impact assessment in Myanmar require project developers to provide environmental information and conduct assessments to inform decision making and account for social impacts. 2. The 2012 Environmental Conservation Law and subsequent regulations establish rules for environmental impact assessments and require consideration of social impacts. Guidelines provide procedures but are still being developed. 3. Key aspects of impact assessments include identifying environmental and social effects, consulting stakeholders including affected communities, and recommending mitigation measures to reduce impacts.

1. Emerging requirements for environmental and social impact
assessment in Myanmar'
Vicky Bowman, Director, Myanmar Center for Responsible Business
ျမန္မာ့စီးပြားေရးက႑တာ၀န္ယူမႈရွိေရးအေထာက္အကူျပဳဌာန(MCRB)
Myanmar Platform for Dialogue on Green Growth, Yangon 24 October 2014
www.mcrb.org.mm
အမွတ္၁၅၊ရွမ္းရိပ္သာလမ္း
(ဆာကူရာေဆးရံုအနီး)
စမ္းေခ်ာင္းၿမိဳ႔နယ္၊ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕
ဖုန္း/ ဖက္(စ္) ၀၁၅၁၀၀၆၉

2. အလွဴရွင္အဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ား
•ယူေကႏိုင္ငံ၏ႏိုင္ငံတကာဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးမႈဌာန(DFID)
•ေနာ္ေဝအစိုးရ
•ဆြစ္ဇာလန္အစိုးရ
•ဒိန္းမတအစိုးရ
•နယ္သာလန္အစိုးရ
•အိုင္ယာလန္www.myanmar-responsiblebusiness.org
အမွတ္(၁၅) ရွမ္းရိပ္သာ၊စမ္းေခ်ာင္းျမိဳ႔နယ္၊
ရန္ကုန္တိုင္း၊ျမန္မာ။
ဖုန္း၊ဖက္(စ္) : ၀၁၅၁၀၀၆၉
ထူေထာင္သူမ်ား
ပို၍တာဝန္ယူမႈရွိေသာစီပြားေရးအေလ့အက်င့္မ်ားျဖစ္ထြန္းလာေစရန္၊ႏိုင္ငံတကာအဆင့္အတန္းမ်ား၊ေဒသလိုအပ္ခ်က္မ်ားအေပၚမူတည္၍ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၌တာဝန္ယူမႈရွိေသာအသိပညာ၊စြမ္းေဆာင္ရည္ႏွင့္စကားဝိုင္းမ်ားျဖစ္ေပၚလာေစရန္အတြက္ထိေရာက္ေသာတရားဝင္အခင္းအက်ဥ္းတစ္ခုပံ့ပိုးေပးရန္။

3.  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.

4.  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

5. 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

6. Prescriptive vs. Guidelines
Performance Standards e.g:
◦“end of pipe” concentration
◦environmental quality standards (e.g.IFCoperational 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)

7. 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?

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

9. Not yet finalized or adopted.
6thdraft 6.6.14
Last ‘public’ consultation was January 2014.
October 2014 –final interministerialconsultation
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 Annexof sectors/project sizes requiring EIA

10. Relevant extracts from the 6th draft Annex

11. Relevant extracts from the 6th draft
Annex

12. 2014 SEZ Law:
◦The management committees are responsible for supervising environmental conservationand protectionin 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 Lawand international standards and normsand 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));

13. 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?

14. Public involvement?
Project affected people (PAP) must be consulted
Stakeholder consultation opportunity
Stakeholder consultation opportunity
Green= required public consultation and disclosure
Orange= opportunity for companies to consult
Extract from the Draft EIA Guidelines (administrative document)

15. Stakeholder consultation opportunity
Public involvement?
Public involvement?
Public involvement?
Stakeholder consultation opportunity
Stakeholder consultation opportunity