So this you should base on an assessment of the impacts of the human health and
safety that arise from the pressures identified in the previous step,
which includes identifying the local natural environmental impacts.
The global environmental impact, the sustainability of the resource use,
the social impacts associated with use of the technology,
the economic viability of the proposed technology.
And then very important, a description of the gaps and
uncertainties related to the environmental technology assessment.
Very often, the gaps and uncertainties related to technology assessments
are quite profound, and those you will have to have into
consideration when passing your preliminary judgements.
Is there even sufficient knowledge for you to pass any kind of judgement?
If it's a very new emerging technology,
very seldom would you have all of the information that you actually
need in order to make an informed preliminary judgement.
And that you have to make extremely clear in your environmental technology
assessment.
Because of course, that will have profound implications for
the eventual policy recommendations that you would like to develop and
whether consensus can be reached among different stakeholders.
In Step 4,
you're asked to provide a comparative assessment of alternative technologies.
And here, environmental technology assessment is actually quite different
from the decisions of poor choice that are normally used to guide decision makers.
Because here, Step 4 actually does not really focus on the technology itself.
It focuses on alternative approaches to meeting the same needs
that the technology is trying to need.