Under the Environmental Protection Act 1986 it is the objective of the EPA to use its best endeavours to protect the environment, and the definition of the environment includes the social surroundings of man - “his aesthetic, cultural, economic and social surroundings to the extent that those surroundings are affected by his physical and biological surroundings”.
It is the EPA’s view that a proposal’s impact on the ‘People’ factors of human health and social surroundings is an important consideration in environmental impact assessment.