Tatsiana Palchekh

Strategic Environmental Assessment in a Transition Country: Development of Sea Screening Criteria for Belarus Tatsiana Palchekh

Screening is the initial stage of strategic environmental assessment (SEA). Screening aims to answer if further application of SEA is needed. The procedure for SEA screening is defined in international documents (SEA Protocol and SEA Directive), however their provisions are very general and leave certain freedom of interpretation. The responsibility to develop SEA screening criteria and define it in national laws rests on each member-state. Screening approaches and types of screening systems vary greatly. There are experienced countries and there are states which are still in the beginning of their way towards the establishment of effective and efficient screening system. Development of a screening system faces a number of problems which are concluded mainly in finding a proper balance between many concurent factors. A frame SEA screening criteria which would guide SEA system developers towards finding a balance need to be developed. For this purpose generic SEA screening criteria (GSSC) and a scheme of their contextualization are developed in this book and Belarus is chosen as a field of application of GSSC-contextualization scheme.