IAIA'11 training course: Understanding impact assessment - principles, methods, and emerging trends
This course is aimed at individuals who have started to work with some form of impact assessment, perhaps using impact assessments to help with their decisionmaking or having to provide information or other forms of input to an impact assessment process. One key purpose of the course is to broaden participants’ understanding of the impact assessment process as a whole, and to appreciate the breadth of application, and what constitutes good practice impact assessment. In particular it aims to show that the basic principles of impact assessment are shared across all forms of the approach, and in different decision-making contexts (policies through to projects).
A second important aim is to highlight significant emerging trends in impact assessment, such as the consolidation of the Equator Principles among private sector financial institutions, the increasing recognition of post-disaster and post-conflict strategic environmental assessment, the rise of sustainability assessment, and climate change impact assessment.
The first part of the course sets the scene, addressing the purposes and benefits of well grounded impact assessment. A generic model of impact assessment is then employed to explore the broad methods and approaches of IA. That model underpins the consideration, in the second part of the course, of the various forms of impact assessment: from social, cultural, and health, to ecological/biophysical; and from strategic assessment of policies to project level IA. The generic model emphasizes an integrated perspective of impact assessment, and the various forms of IA are seen as being interdependent. This platform is then used to explore some of the more important trends in impact assessment.
As the course progresses it will link key themes to topics being addressed in the IAIA conference itself. This will help participants derive greater benefit from the conference, especially for those relatively new to the field.