ABSTRACT In Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), the either positive or negative impacts that specific N project actions might generate on a number M of environmental components are typically summarized in the form of Interaction Matrix (IM). This is an NxM tabular array containing numbers whose sign and magnitude represent the type and severity of impacts. Current approaches to interpret the IM mainly remain on a qualitative level which are limiting its practical usage. In this work, we build on previous works and adopt network theory as a methodology to represent the IM in a graphical form, and to obtain quantitative information that can be inserted in the EIA. The IM corresponds to a bipartite network linking actions and environmental components. The associated network is useful to perform quantitative statistical analyses, which summarise the complexity of cross and mutual interconnections between actions and environmental components under simple and understandable metrics. We show some results from EIAs related to water projects and other case studies, whose different complexity helps to appreciate the general applicability of the method.

中文翻译：

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使用网络理论方法突出行动与环境要素的相互作用

摘要在环境影响评估（EIA）中，通常以交互矩阵（IM）的形式概括特定的N个项目行动可能对M个环境要素产生的正面或负面影响。这是一个NxM表格数组，其中包含数字，其符号和大小表示影响的类型和严重性。当前解释IM的方法主要仍在定性水平上，这限制了IM的实际使用。在这项工作中，我们以先前的工作为基础，并采用网络理论作为方法来以图形形式表示IM，并获得可插入EIA中的定量信息。IM对应于链接行动和环境成分的双向网络。相关联的网络对于执行定量统计分析非常有用，总结了在简单易懂的指标下行动与环境要素之间相互交叉和相互联系的复杂性。我们显示了与水项目和其他案例研究相关的EIA的一些结果，其不同的复杂性有助于理解该方法的一般适用性。