Environmental Assessment for Ocean Energy Schemes: Useful Tools and Case Studies

This work concerns a review of the state of the art of current and practical experience on environmental assessment (including monitoring) in order to set the path to be followed for future ocean energy schemes. It includes a revision of the work done so far in some test sites and deployment sites and discusses the use of several tools considering project phases (installation, deployment and decommissioning) and environmental impact assessment steps (screening, scoping, baseline studies for reference condition characterization, impact identification and evaluation, mitigation measures and monitoring). Within the list of such tools the applicability of checklists, matrices, mathematical modelling, Geographic Information Systems are considered as well as other shared and integrative methods: Environmental Risk Assessment and Life Cycle Analysis