Development of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Empowerment and Advancement Framework Using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) — Based Sensitivity Analysis

Efforts to support Environmental Impact Assessment systems of developing countries have long been initiated. These include studies to analyze present systems of developing countries in southeast Asia including the Philippines [6]. The Philippines is currently implementing a rapid modernization plan through its “Build, build, build” infrastructure program. With environmental degradation as one of the adverse effects of aggressive modernization [1], the study intends to address both the Environmental Impact Assessment constraints of developing countries and how the Philippines can still achieve sustainability in future modernization projects through its Environmental Impact Assessment system. The aim of the research is to create a framework for the empowerment and advancement rating of the EIA System in the country (Fig. 8) considering improvement factors such as access to information, educating the public towards EIA, alignment of the country's EIA with best international practices and enhancing the capability of the implementers of the EIA which in the Philippines is the Environmental Management Bureau (EMB) of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR). The rating was developed by gathering information mainly from forty engineers and specialists from the DENR-EMB through a survey questionnaire. An Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was created based on the hypothesized factors for empowerment and advancement. A neural network-based sensitivity analysis using the Garson's algorithm (GA) was utilized to calculate the relative importance (RI) of these factors to the empowerment and advancement rating of the Philippine EIA system. It was observed that the impact ranking of these parameters was access to information > alignment with international practice > public education > EMB capability having the access to information and EMB capability as the most and least influential parameter to the empowerment and advancement rating of the Philippine EIA system with 33.3% and 19.6%, respectively. The study aided in realizing the full potential of the EIA system of the Philippines and of other developing countries through empowerment and advancement.