O escopo é essa solicitação e pode ser definido de forma diferente em outra solicitação simultânea. A parte relevante dos documentos é esta:
Conditional Per-Request Settings
For additional flexibility, the directives provided by mod_setenvif allow environment variables to be set on a per-request basis, conditional on characteristics of particular requests. For example, a variable could be set only when a specific browser (User-Agent) is making a request, or only when a specific Referer [sic] header is found. Even more flexibility is available through the mod_rewrite's RewriteRule which uses the [E=...] option to set environment variables.