Fifteen years of Environmental Impact Assessment in Bangalesh : current practice, challenges and future directions

The aim of this article is to review the current practice of EIA system in Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, EIA has been practiced for more than fifteen years. However, there is a lack of scientific information about the current practice of EIA in Bangladesh. This article focused and reviewed three key areas of EIA system in Bangladesh : institutional arrangement, quality of EISs and implementation of mitigation measures. By using a set of good practice criteria, this article finds that still there are shortcomings in current EIA practice despite that fact that EIA practice in Bangladesh has been improving over the last fifteen years. This means Bangladesh could not harness the full benefit of EIA yet. This article suggest that in order to harness the full benefits of EIA, adequate implementation of mitigation measures is imperative while improving the capacity of proponents, regulatory agency and the quality of EIS.