While I know that France has been making huge efforts to improve impact mitigation and foster biodiversity offsets I just came across some interesting websites by the French Ministry for the Environment (Ministère de l’écologie, du développement durable et de l’énergie) — thanks to Baptiste Regnery for pointing me to it.
In France, a big work has been recently conducted by the ministry which led to the “doctrine ERC” and the “lignes directrices”.The ERC concept, namely Eviter-Reduire-Compenser, can be seen as the “French version” of the mitigation hierarchy (Avoid-Minimize-Compensate).
The documents are available to download in French here:
– the “doctrine ERC”:
http://www.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/Doctrine-eviter-reduire-et,28438.html
– the “lignes directrices”:
http://www.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/Lignes-directrices-nationales-sur.html
The “doctrine ERC” is a simple 9-pager which includes the following topics:
- Objectif de la doctrine
- Concevoir le projet de moindre impact pour l’environnement
- Donner la priorité à l’évitement, puis à la réduction
- Assurer la cohérence et la complémentarité des mesures environnementales prises au titre de différentes procédures
- Identifier et caractériser les impacts
- Définir les mesures compensatoires
- Pérenniser les effets de mesures de réduction et de compensation aussi longtemps que les impacts sont présents
- Fixer dans les autorisations les mesures à prendre, les objectifs de résultats et en suivre l’exécution et l’efficacité
The “Lignes directrices nationales sur la séquence éviter, réduire et compenser les impacts sur les milieux naturels” is a very extensive and nicely layouted publication (232p., October 2013) that aims to provide guidance for the implementation of the ERC doctrine. The ERC doctrine as outlined above is included word by word in the first section of these guidelines. It is followed by step-by-step recommendations how to go through the mitigation hierarchy when planning and implementing a project. On 31 thematic spread sheets single steps or specific cases are presented very detailed, e.g. for marine environments.
As the links had been moved in the mean time, I have uploaded the pdf of the two documents below:
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