Environmental law
Environmental law - or "environmental and natural resources law" - is a collective term describing the network of treaties, statutes, regulations, and common and customary laws addressing the effects of human activity on the natural environment.
Regulatory subjects
The broad category of "environmental law" may be broken down into a number of more specific regulatory subjects. While there is no single agreed-upon taxonomy, the core environmental law regimes address environmental pollution. A related but distinct set of regulatory regimes, now strongly influenced by environmental legal principles, focus on the management of specific natural resources, such as forests, minerals, or fisheries. Other areas, such as environmental impact assessment, may not fit neatly into either category, but are nonetheless important components of environmental law.
Impact assessment
Environmental impact assessment (EA) is the term used for the assessment of the environmental consequences (positive and negative) of a plan, policy, program, or project prior to the decision to move forward with the proposed action. In this context, the term 'environmental impact assessment' (EIA) is usually used when applied to concrete projects and the term 'strategic environmental assessment' applies to policies, plans and programmes (Fischer, 2016). Environmental assessments may be governed by rules of administrative procedure regarding public participation and documentation of decision making, and may be subject to judicial review.