In early 1980's, Environmental Impact Assessment(EIA) System was introduced in Korea to ensure that environmental matters should be considered in the decision-making process particularly for environmentally sensitive projects.
However the effectiveness of EIA system was hampered by institutional and technical factors. The EIA system usually carried out after many important strategic decisions have already been made. Therefore, it often addresses only a limited range of alternatives and mitigation measures. As the EIA system for project works generally limited to the direct impact of projects, various impacts such as additive impacts, synergistic impacts, global impacts and etc. would often be ignored.
In order to overcome such a limit in EIA system, Prior Environmental Review System(PERS) was introduced for assessment of administrative plans mainly concerned with development projects. In 1999, the regulations for PERS have been established by an amendment of the Basic Environmental Policy Act. Therefore the foundation of Environmental Assessment(EA) system to integrate environmental concerns in planning processes and project works has been reformed.
However the results of the execution of PERS were somewhat insufficient due to the institutional and technical matters such as followings;
1) very limited range of threshold values for PERS
2) absence of legal methods to confirm the execution of PERS results
Therefore, it was required to review the PERS associated with both institutional and technical matters and these were studied in this research.