As already mentioned, to determine the environmental damage it is necessary to verify the evidence of such damage.
However, the assessment and conclusion on whether environmental damage has occurred can be resource intensive, complex and take an extended period. The early identification of clues of environmental damage can be valuable therefore to facilitate a screening of the likelihood of environmental damage having occurred prior to committing these resources.
In practice, it is a matter of pre-defining those elements which, when evaluated in a preliminary phase of investigation, suggest the possible presence of environmental damage, and direct the investigation towards the phase of determination of the evidence.
In fact, when there are one or more clues of damage, other investigations are required to confirm the existence of the evidence of damage. On the contrary, if the clues are not found, the environmental damage assessment under ELD may end with the case filing as “non-ELD case”, which means a case where the environmental damage under ELD has not occurred or is not determined (see par. 1.6 – Terminology). In addition, when there is insufficient data or information to enable a judgement, the possibility/legitimacy/needs/benefits of collecting/requiring further data/information through further investigations should be evaluated.
However, the ISPD tables, other than including indicators to identify the clues of environmental damage, have also included indicators that directly provide you, for their definition or analogy, evidence of environmental damage. In addition to these indicators of evidence, it is also to be noted that even some indicators for the clues can represent themselves a high probability of environmental damage when their value is significant.
Hence, the steps of preliminary assessment, namely the screening and the identification of the clues of damage, may be conducted also by non-expert users, in lieu of the expert judgement, thanks to this methodology based on the use of the DPSIR model adapted to environmental damage assessment, accompanied using ISPD tables of pre-defined indicators useful for the assessment of the potential ELD cases. Instead, the determination of evidence of damage under ELD, should be conducted by expert judgment for biodiversity assessments, water management and monitoring and for land contamination, for which the DPSIR adapted methodology and the ISPD tables may represent a helpful tool and a methodological guide for their expert judgement.
Note: the ISPD tables can be used during the whole investigation. This means that the ISPD tables may be used and filled of data, information, and evaluations since the screening phase until the determination of environmental damage.
For each component of the ISPD model, ISPD tables containing indicators have been developed in which the following elements have been defined in columns:
- OBJECTIVE: containing the evaluation objective of each group of indicators;
- INDICATORS: containing the definition of each indicator;
- DESCRIPTION: containing the description of the possible indicator’s qualitative/quantitative values (quantitative values may be significance thresholds);
- NOTES: containing the indicator’s values for the case being investigated;
- EVALUATION: containing the evaluation of each group of indicators grouped by objective;
- INTERIM JUDGEMENT: containing the interim evaluation of the case being investigated.
Note: the ISPD tables are non exhaustive, i.e., case specific indicators could be added according to the user needs as long as they will be categorised by the objective of the evaluation.