Assessment of direct and indirect effects of building developments on the environment

Abstract

Any building construction undertaking is inseparable from the environment in which it will be executed. Among all buildings, the most difficult ones from the point of view of nature protection are those which have been classified as having a considerable impact on the environment. Roads and road infrastructure are a particular case. Construction of roads or railroads and their subsequent long-term use lead to many changes in the environment. When planning such building projects, it is recommended to develop variant solutions in order to choose the one that would be least harmful to the environment, and then to submit them to an objective assessment. To facilitate the selection of an optimal solution, assessment indicators are developed. However, it needs to be remembered that a factor perceived as a negative one in the immediate assessment might generate positive consequences on a broader scale and vice versa. Hence, an assessment of the impacts on the environment caused by building projects should be viewed in the context of indirect (global) and direct (local) effects. This article will present a model analysis of the impacts caused by a fragment of a road, including local and global effects measured by the indicator method. This method has been developed by the author of this article, who believes that it enables the user to make a complex analysis, while the graphic presentation it involves, discussed in the conclusions to this paper, helps to decide easily which factors are decisive in the final assessment of the analysed project.