In the environmental impact assessment, we assess the most significant potential environmental impacts resulting from the FTA in both the EU and Australia. Although the analytical work carried out in the ex-ante study has shown that, overall, environmental impacts are likely to be limited both in Australia and the EU, selected environmental effects or effects in certain sectors still needed to be studied.
We identified six main environmental impact areas: climate change, air quality, land use & soil, biodiversity, water and waste. Even though the impact assessment on each environmental impact area relies on both qualitative and quantitative research methods (where applicable), the analyses for the first two impact areas (climate change and air quality) heavily employ quantitative methods. The analyses on the remaining impact areas mostly rely on qualitative methods.