SCAIL is a form of Environmental Impact Assessment that estimates the effect of agricultural emissions on designated ecological sites. These assessments can be required for proposals involving new buildings for cattle, pig and poultry housing, slurry lagoons and farm yard manure storage.

The SCAIL screening tool models the emissions of nitrogen oxide, sulphur dioxide and ammonia and their subsequent deposition on sensitive sites within a set radius of a site. The model determines the exceedance or non-exceedance of the habitat’s impact limit, which can lead to further modelling or site-specific investigation of proposed emissions if required.

Our work in this area includes running the SCAIL calculation tool, interpreting the results and providing formal written assessments of the relevant site-specific screening thresholds.