Seven good practices for the environmental licensing of coastal interventions: Lessons from the Italian, Cuban, Spanish and Colombian regulatory frameworks and insights on coastal processes

Environmental licensing is the regulatory procedure that enforces the environmental impact assessment (EIA) of human activities inside a given country. Despite worldwide acceptance of EIA as a valid tool, its application in coastal environments is still too diverse and limited regarding the specificity of the natural processes influencing the shore. This paper compares the Environmental Licensing Procedure (ELP) of four countries, focusing on the activities that could affect the coastal geomorphology. The acquisition and validation of information were done through interviews with EIA representatives in each country, who signalized the official documents of environmental licensing and coastal management to be considered in the documentary review. The results present those differences and similarities among ELP stages in each country, based on the principles of the International Association of Impact Assessment and the national documents analyzed. In sum, 59 interventions associated with human uses and activities in the coastal zone were compared according to the prescriptive character of the environmental licensing in Italy, Spain, Cuba and Colombia. The natural processes influencing coastal geomorphology were also analyzed within the technical criteria included in the official guidelines for the EIA, finding a generalized weakness in processes associated with geochemical courses on coastal environments. By way of discussion, seven good practices are illustrated, according to their pertinence to the impact assessment of the coastal zone: 1) The integration of screening and scoping; 2) Evaluation focusing on the environment rather than the intervention; 3) Binding the coastal zone delimitation; 4) Institutional articulation; 5) Accreditation of environmental consultancies; 6) Official guidelines by types of environment; 7) The integration of environmental geographic information. Finally, general conclusions to assist EIA practitioners operating in the four countries and recommendations to lead further research are provided, introducing a novel process-oriented approach for ELP.