Environmental Assessment and Management: Aims of EIA, EIS and EMP, EIA Guidelines and Methodologies, Review of EIA, Life-Cycle and Cost-Benefit Analysis, Environmental Audit and Planning, ISO 14000, the EIA Notification 2006 and its Amendments, Eco-Labelling, and Risk Assessment

In the Battelle system, if a parameter carries 20 PIU and its environmental quality would fall from 0.8 without the project to 0.5 with it, the impact is 20 × (0.5 − 0.8) = −6 environmental impact units, a loss of 6 EIU; summing over all 78 parameters gives the project's net environmental score and allows alternatives to be compared. Reviewing an EIA means judging whether the report is adequate for a decision: whether baseline data are sufficient (commonly at least one season of primary data outside the monsoon, and secondary data for the rest), whether impacts are predicted with appropriate models and not merely described, whether alternatives have been genuinely considered, whether the EMP is specific and funded, and whether public concerns have been addressed. Structured review packages, such as that of Lee and Colley (1990), grade each section, and in India the appraisal committee may send a report back for additional studies.

Life-cycle analysis (assessment) evaluates the environmental burdens of a product or service over its whole life, from the extraction of raw materials through manufacture, distribution and use to final disposal: "cradle to grave". Its narrower forms are "cradle to gate" (up to the factory gate) and its ideal is "cradle to cradle", in which materials are cycled indefinitely. ISO 14040 and 14044 define four phases: goal and scope definition, which fixes the functional unit (for example, a litre of packaged milk delivered) and the system boundary; life-cycle inventory analysis, which quantifies all inputs of energy and materials and outputs of emissions and wastes; life-cycle impact assessment, which classifies these into impact categories such as climate change, acidification, eutrophication and ozone depletion and characterises them with factors such as global warming potentials; and interpretation, which draws conclusions and checks their sensitivity. Life-cycle analysis often overturns intuition, for example about paper versus plastic bags, because the answer depends on how many times a product is reused and what the functional unit is.

Cost-benefit analysis compares the benefits of a project with its costs, all expressed in money, over its life. Because a rupee today is worth more than a rupee in the future, future values are discounted to present values: PV = FV ÷ (1 + r)^t, so a benefit of 110 received in one year at a 10% discount rate is worth 100 today. The net present value is the sum of discounted benefits minus discounted costs, and a project is worthwhile if NPV is positive or, equivalently, if the benefit-cost ratio exceeds 1. For environmental decisions the difficulties are valuing non-market goods, such as clean air, biodiversity and lives, by the travel-cost, hedonic and contingent-valuation methods, and choosing the discount rate: a high rate makes long-term harms, such as climate change felt by future generations, look almost worthless today, which is why low discount rates are argued for in environmental appraisal.

An environmental audit is a systematic, documented, periodic and objective evaluation of how well an organisation, its management and its equipment are performing in protecting the environment. It may be a compliance audit (against laws and consent conditions), a management-system audit (against a standard such as ISO 14001), a waste, energy or water audit (to find savings), a due-diligence or liability audit (before buying a site or company) or a post-project audit of an EIA's predictions. It proceeds in three stages: pre-audit (defining scope, gathering information, questionnaires), on-site audit (inspection, interviews, records, sampling) and post-audit (report, findings and an action plan). In India, every person carrying on an industry that needs consent under the Water or Air Act or authorisation under the hazardous waste rules must submit an environmental statement for each financial year ending on 31 March to the State Pollution Control Board by 30 September, a form of self-audit introduced into the Environment (Protection) Rules in the early 1990s. Environmental planning builds environmental considerations into decisions before projects exist: siting industries through zoning atlases and carrying-capacity studies, and strategic environmental assessment of policies, plans and programmes, which catches cumulative impacts that project-by-project EIA misses.

Eco-labelling schemes award a label to products that are less harmful to the environment over their life cycle than others in the same category, letting consumers choose and rewarding producers. Germany's Blue Angel (1978) was the first; others include the Nordic Swan (1989), the EU Ecolabel (1992) and the United States Energy Star (1992). India's Ecomark, launched in 1991 by the Ministry of Environment and Forests and administered with the Bureau of Indian Standards, uses an earthen pot as its logo and is given to products that meet both quality standards and environmental criteria; take-up has been limited. The Bureau of Energy Efficiency's star labels for appliances (from 2006) are a widely recognised energy label.

A hazard is something with the potential to cause harm; risk is the probability that harm will occur combined with its severity, often expressed as risk = probability × consequence. Risk assessment follows the steps the syllabus names, which match the framework of the United States National Research Council's "Red Book" (1983). Hazard identification asks what can go wrong or what harm a substance can cause, using hazard and operability studies (HAZOP), what-if analysis, checklists and failure mode and effects analysis for plants, and toxicological evidence for chemicals. Hazard accounting quantifies the inventory of hazardous substances and the credible accident sequences, using fault-tree analysis (working back from a top event to its causes) and event-tree analysis (working forward from an initiating event to its outcomes) and maximum credible accident analysis. Scenarios of exposure describe who is exposed, by which pathways and routes, to what dose, for example a toxic gas release dispersed downwind or a chemical in drinking water. Risk characterisation combines hazard and exposure into an estimate of risk and its uncertainty. Risk management decides what to do: eliminate or reduce the hazard, add safeguards, transfer risk by insurance, and prepare on-site and off-site emergency plans, as India's Manufacture, Storage and Import of Hazardous Chemical Rules 1989 require of major-accident-hazard installations.

For chemical exposures risk is characterised numerically. For non-carcinogenic effects the hazard quotient is the estimated daily dose divided by the reference dose, the dose believed to be without appreciable risk over a lifetime: HQ = exposure ÷ RfD. An HQ above 1 signals concern; if a pollutant in water gives an intake of 0.006 mg/kg/day and its RfD is 0.003 mg/kg/day, HQ = 2. For carcinogens, which are assumed to have no threshold, the excess lifetime cancer risk is the chronic daily intake multiplied by the cancer slope factor; an intake of 2 × 10⁻⁴ mg/kg/day with a slope factor of 1.5 (mg/kg/day)⁻¹ gives a risk of 3 × 10⁻⁴, three extra cancers in 10,000 people exposed for a lifetime, well above the level of about one in a million often treated as negligible. The syllabus's "Manufacture, Storage and Import of Hazardous Chemical (Amendment) Rules, 2000" amended the principal Rules of 1989, which remain in force with their later amendments.