IESD was privileged to host Professor Lex Brown, from 21st February to 24th February 2013. He is a visiting Professor with expertise in Environmental Impact Assessment.

In the three days of intensive courses, Professor Brown engaged the masters and PhD students in interactive lectures on the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). The lectures showed the need of adopting a new dimension of EIA; Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) as a tool to complement EIA in areas that EIA has limitations like in Evaluation of policies, plans and programmes on a larger scale.

Drawing from his vast experience in the field of EIA for over three decades, the students learned a lot.  The Professor cited some of the major projects in the world that had problems with carrying out of EIA and its implementation, and how this later caused a lot of collateral Damage to the Environment. This helped to foster the understanding the need and the importance of EIA in Project implementation.

Finally, through the discussions there was an agreement that there should be a shift from just safeguarding Environment alone which has been going on through EIA to safeguarding and mainstreaming of Environment in organization through Environmental evaluation of the programmes, policies and plans through SEA.