Donald McGillivray

Mitigation, Compensation and Conservation: Screening for Appropriate Assessment Under the EU Habitats Directive

Increasingly, development is facilitated through the provision of mitigation and compensation measures. One reason for this is to get round ever more stringent conservation laws. In this article I consider this general issue through one particular lens: the role and scope of appropriate assessment under the EU Habitats Directive (92/43/EEC). Appropriate assessment is a key part of the Directive’s regime for conserving Natura 2000 sites, being the threshold for a relatively stringent public interest test and ecological compensation requirement. One particular issue is how mitigation or compensation measures should be addressed through appropriate assessment. I consider this issue, looking in particular at the only reported case which deals with this: R (Hart District Council) v Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government and others. I suggest that Hart may be seen as wrongly decided at the time, and that more recent case law casts further doubt on its correctness. Drawing on other work, I suggest how decision-makers might answer the question raised in Hart differently and the scope to do this under the Habitats Directive.

Analysing Analysis: Reporting, Reviewing and Re-appraising Environmental Law

The 25th Anniversary of the Journal of Environmental Law offers an opportunity to review the content of the Analysis section of the Journal, charting how it began life with an intention to report cases as well as to offer an analysis of them. The broad coverage of the section over 25 years is explored to allow discussion of the development of environmental law as a discipline over this time. In particular the role of a comment section is considered in an era in which news of legal developments and critiques of these are available contemporaneously from a multiplicity of sources. With this in mind, the future of Analysis is debated.

Book Review: Sustainability, Land Use and Environment: A Legal AnalysisSUSTAINABILITY, LAND USE AND ENVIRONMENT: A LEGAL ANALYSISStallworthyMarkCavendish, 2002. xlii + 369 pp ISBN 1859 41647 0, £48.40 paperback

may or may not be acce table in the context of the overall ob’ectives of &e planning authorities. In contrast, because of its early history, the control in the Water Resources Act is, essentia -lator ly, too narrow. This leads to the arguments over whether the em hasis is on the nature of the matter discharg3 or the impact of that matter. If a purposive view is to be taken the control should sure1 be over any disch tentially hannL1 to the quality o#E %:

Compensating Biodiversity Loss: The EU Commission’s Approach to Compensation under Article 6 of the Habitats Directive

E t , as worded, the emphasis is on the inherently destructive nature of the matter being discharged.