カーボンフットプリントを超えて：気候変動時代における環境影響評価の新たな課題

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:EIA/SEAと気候評価の統合、特にScope 3の帰属と有意性判断の方法論的空白を整理する枠組みとして有用。

🏢実務担当者:インフラ・開発事業者は、環境アセス段階で間接排出と気候リスクをどう評価範囲に含めるかの実務指針として参照できる。

🏛政策担当者:アセス制度に気候緩和・適応を組み込む際の論点（評価範囲、基準シナリオ、有意性閾値）を整理する参考になる。

Climate change has long since been incorporated into the regulatory framework for environmental assessments. Directive 2014/52/EU (European Parliament and Council of the European Union, 2014), by amending the European framework for Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), had already explicitly provided for the need to consider both the effects of projects on the climate – in particular through greenhouse gas emissions – and their vulnerability to climate change. Yet, despite this regulatory recognition, the integration of the climate dimension into environmental assessment practices has long remained inconsistent, often limited to estimating direct emissions or assessing the energy performance of projects. In recent years, however, the landscape has changed profoundly. The growing prominence of decarbonisation targets in European policies, the evolution of emissions accounting tools and, not least, the rise in international climate litigation have helped to refocus attention on a fundamental question: to what extent must a project’s climate impacts be taken into account in decisions authorising its implementation? Particularly significant in this context was the ruling by the UK Supreme Court in the case of Finch v. Surrey County Council (UK Supreme Court, 2024), concerning the authorisation of an oil extraction project. The Court ruled that the environmental assessment could not be limited to emissions generated directly by the extraction activities, but must also include those arising from the subsequent combustion of the oil produced. Although the ruling related to a specific legal and project context, it helped to fuel an international debate on the scope of climate assessment, the relevance of indirect emissions (Scope 3) and the relationship between authorised activities and the effects that manifest themselves along their respective value chains.It is against this backdrop that the ‘Guidelines for the integration of climate assessment into environmental assessments’ (MASE et al., 2025) were published. These were drawn up by the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security, in collaboration with the Department for Cohesion Policies and with technical support from the European Investment Bank through the JASPERS initiative. The document, dated July 2025 and subsequently made available via the ministry’s portal, proposes a methodological framework for integrating the climate assessment tools already developed under European cohesion policy (European Commission, 2021) into SEA and EIA procedures. The approach is structured around two complementary dimensions: ‘mitigation’, aimed at assessing projects’ contribution to climate-changing emissions and their consistency with climate neutrality objectives; and ‘adaptation’, aimed at assessing the vulnerability and resilience of infrastructure in relation to current and future climatic conditions. This represents an important step towards greater systematicity and transparency in assessments, though it also introduces new challenges in terms of interpretation and application. The availability of methodologies to quantify emissions, identify relevant sources and analyse climate risks does not, in fact, automatically resolve the problem of impact assessment. Which emissions should be included within the scope of the analysis? How can we distinguish between those merely associated with an activity and those actually attributable to the implementation of the project? Against which reference scenario should they be assessed? And above all, how can we determine whether a project’s climate impact is significant, and which measures are genuinely capable of preventing, reducing or offsetting it?

• openalex https://www.ingegneriadellambiente.net/ojs/index.php/ida/article/view/675first seen 2026-11-05 05:21:04 · last seen 2026-11-06 05:00:11