Environmental Impact Assessment of Subsurface Drainage Projects

Abstract

Nowadays, Egypt is entering a new phase in which human food needs must harmonize with environmental and sustainable principles. Drainage impacts on the environment have given rise to a lot of concern, so in the future the design and operation of drainage systems should satisfy both agricultural and environmental objectives. Therefore, this study was developed to perform environmental impact assessment (EIA) for the subsurface drainage projects. The study was carried out on Mashtul Pilot Area (MPA) in Egypt as a real case study and the experimental fieldwork. The study was conducted in two main steps: The first one is the experimental fieldwork that was formulated to obtain measured data necessary to evaluate and assess the impact of subsurface drainage projects in the main categories of the environmental issues. The second step is developing an EIA matrix for subsurface drainage projects to qualify and quantify the baseline of environmental setting accompanied with their potential impacts. Expertise advice and help were used to assess these indices based on the degree of each impact and distributed among environmental issues to quantify the overall impacts. It could be concluded that subsurface drainage projects have direct and indirect impacts. These impacts could be positive or negative. The results of the EIA matrix application for subsurface drainage projects according to the expert’s evaluation and expertise prevailed that the environmental impact assessment of subsurface drainage projects according to the environmentally feasible existing situation and substantial benefits is very likely to affect positively 85.50%, zero 6.5%, and negatively 5%. These values indicate that subsurface drainage projects have significant positive impacts on irrigation and drainage environment.