Following the user-testing sessions, we prioritised three key ideas to explore further – The National Environmental Datahub, Digital EIA Workspace and Post-Application Monitoring. These were identified as the concepts that could have the largest positive effect on the EIA process.
The Digital EIA Workspace can be used when completing an Environmental Impact Assessment for a project. It enables users in various locations and organisations to access standard templates and methods, use pre-populated policy and legislation text, collate and assess information and data. It acts as one centralised place for collaboration between project teams and stakeholders, where they can manage tasks and overlaps, visualise data and work together on outputs.
At the end of the process, the Digital EIA Workspace could be ‘published’ and presented as an Interactive & Accessible Environmental Statement for use in consultation and stakeholder engagement.
Enables all involved in reporting of an EIA to log in and work in a shared and transparent working area to write the ES:
Enables users to see who else is collaborating in the EIA workspace, with EIA coordinators also being able to search and add new contributors and set access levels:
Impact Modelling forms part of the Digital EIA Workspace idea. It allows users to overlay different scheme details with existing open data and project data to predict the changes in environmental effects. This tool could be customised and ‘powered up’ by adding extra assessment tools from the plug-in marketplace.
Users can add or purchase plug-ins to add new functions to the workspace. These may be developed by SMEs and other businesses who have taken the opportunity presented by the workspace and Datahub to develop new products and services:
