Assessing the Integrability of Environmental Impact Assessment and Construction Social Costs

Every type of construction causes significant, and often unquantifiable, inconvenience and disruption for the general public and surrounding environment. These are termed social costs. Construction causative adverse impacts on the neighboring communities are known as the social costs. The construction activities in housing areas have negative effects on neighboring community, such as noise, air pollution, and disruption of the surroundings, closing of roads, detours, damaged facilities, and decreased quality of life for a period of time due to the execution construction projects. Many developing countries, such as Iraq, do not have clearly-defined building regulations and are thus unable to force contractors to mitigate the social costs of the developments. The exposure of nearby residents to these social costs depends, to a large extent, on existing building approval measures and regulations, which differ between countries and even occasionally between regions within countries. Therefore, developing countries like Iraq incur high social costs due to the looseness of their building regulations. This study aims to evaluate the integrability of environmental impact assessment and construction social costs. For that reasons, both qualitative and quantitative methods have been used. The questionnaires were about the adverse impacts of construction on public people to determine the rate of occurring construction social cost for fifteen projects which selected and the researcher interviewed a total of twenty-one voluntary participants by using semi-structured interview. The framework presented in this study provides a useful tool for the consideration of construction social costs in the conduct of an environmental impact assessment and thus, should be a subject of impact studies. This framework provides a link between the biophysical and social dimensions of construction impacts.