Draft bill of the Federal Environment Ministry to modernise the law on environmental impact assessments (EIAs)

Within the scope of the recent hearing of the German associations at the end of December 2016, the Federal Environment Ministry has distributed the draft bill to modernise environmental impact assessments. The draft bill serves for an amendment of federal law in order to meet the requirements of Directive 2014/52/EU of the European Parliament and Council of 16th April 2014 concerning an amendment of Directive 2011/92/EU on environmental impact assessments for certain public and private projects (OJ No. L 124 of 2014-04-25, page 1 ff.).

Amendments are required in particular with regard to area protection, climate protection and climate change adaptation, energy efficiency and risk of accidents and disaster, among other things concerning the requirements on preliminary environmental compatiblity studies and environmental impact assessments.

The objective is to simplify the regulations on environmental impact assessments as a whole, to harmonise them and make them more user-friendly. This is valid in particular for regulations determining whether a project is subject to an environmental impact assessment. The necessity of an amendment results from European law.

It can be assumed that a whole range of amendments will be made until the law is finally adopted.

The draft bill includes the following innovations:

  • The project sponsor has the possibility to immediately apply for an environmental impact assessment in order to avoid a preliminary environmental compatiblity study. At the latest six weeks after receipt of the documents, the authorities have to decide whether an environmental impact assessment is required for the respective project subject to a preliminary investigation. By way of exception, this period can be extended by the authorities by another three weeks. The deadlines have not yet been agreed upon.
  • The documents to be submitted for the preliminary investigation or the environmental impact assessment and the criteria to be tested (e.g. effects on the climate) will be extended.
  • The regulations on when changes and extensions of existing projects are subject to an environmental impact assessment due to a missing environmental impact assessment of the initial project are planned to be considerably revised. According to the draft bill old projects still won’t be considered with regard to an obligation for an environmental impact assessment (as yet in section 3 b paragraph 3 item 3 of the environmental impact assessment law). This is valid for projects passed already before the expiration of the environmental impact assessment directive in its respective version (1988 according to 85/337/EEC or 1999 according to 97/11/EC). However, the environmental effects of these old projects are to be taken into account in the preliminary environmental compatibility study as preload.
  • The Federal Government and the Federal Lands shall create a common website for the publishing of documents and for the announcement of projects so that companies can make extensive documents available to the public on a central internet platform in the future.
  • The aggregation rules are planned to be basically revised (i.e. the consideration of several projects as a unit to determine whether an environmental impact assessment is obligatory), as there is a considerable legal uncertainty at present. The spatial and functional connections required for the cumulation of several partial projects to one project will be specified. This is due to the „Ireland Judgement“ of the European Court of Justice of 21st September 1999 and the later judgement of the Federal Administrative Court of 18th June 2015.

Your contact persons for environmental impact assessments

The federal law on environmental impact assessments for certain public and private projects is planned to be amended.

Additional pages