Integrated Environmental Assessment
- intermittent fieldwork
- months-years timescale
- high resource requirement.
Integrated Environmental Assessments are ways of analysing and communicating multi-dimensional sustainability research questions, often across large scales. IEAs are a compilation of scientific and other findings in a form useful as input to governance and have been traditionally used to inform certain kinds of decision makers about complex society - environment interactions. A basic job of IEAs is to represent potential response options which usually take the form of policies or other actions.
Over recent decades IEAs have become embedded in long-term environmental assessment and governance structures often purposefully and explicitly promoted for this purpose. For example, the UNEP IEA Training Manual suggests "ideally, IEAs are not one-off exercises but integrated, ongoing elements of environmental and sustainable development governance." The products of the International Panel on Climate Change are perhaps the most well known example of IEAs that have been embedded and have evolved over the course of decades.
- Should I use Integrated Environmental Assessment?
An IEA is a substantial undertaking. The IEA training manual (2009) outlines a seven stage process of monitoring, evaluation and learning, over a minimum two to three year time period. Stages include start-up; institutional set-up; scoping and design; planning; implementation; communication of results and outreach; monitoring, evaluation and learning. A wide range of research skills and capabilities are required depending on the sub-methods and knowledges to be integrated in the assessment.
There are two major characteristics of an IEA. First, the outputs of IEAs are explicitly orientated towards 'decision makers' and policy actors rather than advancing understanding for its own sake. Second, IEAs achieve their aims through 'integrating' broader sets of methods, knowledges and degrees of certainty than might be achieved from any single discipline or domain.
IEAs typically address three fundamental questions:
- What is happening to the environment and why?
- What are the consequences for the environment and humanity?
- What can we do and what are we doing about it?
Two additional questions are often added to bolster policy advice that might address goals of sustainable development. These are:
- Given the current state of the system under analysis, where are we heading?
- What actions can be taken for a more sustainable future?
IEAs address these questions through processes of assessment, integrating knowledge often produced from multiple disciplines. At the heart of this is an enquiry into links between the social world and the natural world and causal relationships between these domains. Typically using forms of cost-benefit assessment, IEAs consider the causes of human actions, the impacts of these actions and the costs of responses that might mitigate harms arising from these actions. For example, applied to climate change, IEAs have been used to assess human produced greenhouse gas emissions, the impacts on the natural and social worlds of these emissions, and costs for abating or adapting these costs.
IEAs are valued for their ability to conduct assessments at large spatial scales, often global or regional, and using models and scenarios, at long range temporal scales, stretching decades into the future. In doing this, IEA are designed to take seriously Burndtland's call for attention to be directed not only at interactions between environment and development, but also for the need to consider the needs of future generations. In addressing these needs, IEAs often seek to assess the range of possible futures and to create policies that take this knowledge into account.
- How do I use Intergrated Environmental Assessment?
Broadly defined, assessment, in contrast to basic or fundamental research, is the collation and presentation of knowledge derived from prior research to help individuals with responsibilities to evaluate possible actions or think about a problem. IEAs seek to integrate knowledge that might contribute to a holistic, or whole-system policy assessment. The standard view, or primary dimension of integration, refers to causal chains that joins human actions to valued consequences. This is often referred to as an end-to-end view of integration. So taking the example of climate change again this end-to-end view assesses the social and economic factors that drive emissions, investigate aspects of atmospheric chemistry that contribute to physical changes to climate, assess global and local changes to climate and weather systems and address impacts of climate change on ecosystems and ultimately on human welfare. In this way the cost of responses of a sustainability problem are compared to the impacts they mitigate.
Many other dimensions of integrations might be relevant to assessments in given contexts. For example, dimensions could include human activities that contribute to environmental harms, organised by type of activity, sector, location, time and so on. Or dimensions could include a subset of Sustainability Development Goal targets or indicators. Dimensions might also include analytical styles rather than the substantive content of the outputs they yield. What kinds of integration will be necessary for a successful assessment will depend on the policy issues at hand. Figure 1 offers a simplified account of the human - environment interactions that are considered in an IEA framework.
Figure 1. Simplified analytic framework for integrated environmental assessment. Reproduced from United Nations Environment Programme (2009)[Rights cleared]
The seemingly straightforward flows of figure 1 quickly give way to significant complexity when applied to a specific problem domain at regional or global level. This is often most evident in the set of internal methods, which are used to carry out a particular assessment.
The methods may be quantitative and/or qualitative, technical and/or participative, etc. This set of methods is usually chosen to serve different kinds of tasks within the overall methodology; for example (Lee, 2006) to: describe existing environmental, economic and social conditions; predict likely future conditions under a scenario of no new policy measures (called the 'policy-off' scenario); identify alternative strategies to address problems identified and contribute to the attainment of the goals; compare the likely outcomes for each option.
For each assessment task, there will often be a cascading set of alternative methods, data sources and participants. Choices here can have a major influence on the quality and legitimacy of the overall IEA. Factors taken into account when choosing alternative methods can include the level of detail and degree of accuracy with which the task needs to be performed, the consistency of each method selected with other assessment methods within the overall IEA. The data, expertise, time and other resource requirements of each method. The transparency, intelligibility and credibility of each method as perceived by relevant stakeholders of the assessment.
IEAs usually employ software based models in order to provide an organising framework for conducting research that can scale to and compute large sets of data. These can be highly complex, often millions of lines of code, and can require significant investment time for researchers to build competencies. A set of well-known models are listed below. In practise researchers may use models as a guiding tool for research prioritisation within the IEA. Indeed, the assessment emerges iteratively from insights provided by the model and investigations in the substantive domains. The output data is usually converted into indicators and indices for the purpose of communicating relevant policy issues. The GEO IEA model used by UNEP includes a core indicator set built into the model. With indicators in hand, the analyst is charged with deriving meaning from them examining trends, correlations and spatial relationships.
- Examples of Integrated Environmental Assessment in Sustainability Research
- RAINS Model on European Acid Rain--not an integrated assessment of climate change, but the ongoing RAINS project on European acid rain provides a strong example of an integrated assessment project contributing directly to policy-making.
- GEO-4 analytic approach -- [#UnitedNationsEnvironmentProgramme2009]
- The DPSIR framework -- [#UnitedNationsEnvironmentProgramme2009]
- State of Biodiversity in Africa (Aichi goals) – World Conservation Monitoring Centre, Cambridge, UNEP
- Emission Gap Reports – UNEP
- Products of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
- References and Resources
Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN). 1995. Thematic Guide to Integrated Assessment Modeling of Climate Change [online]. Palisades, NY: CIESIN. Available at http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/mva/iamcc.tg/TGHP.html
United Nations Environment Programme (2009) ‘IEA Training Manual’, Integrated Environmental Assessment Training Manual, p. 28. doi: 10.1016/S0026-0576(07)80624-6.
Lee, N. (2006) ‘Bridging the gap between theory and practice in integrated assessment’, Environmental Impact Assessment Review. Elsevier, 26(1), pp. 57–78. doi: 10.1016/J.EIAR.2005.01.001.
Pintér, L., Zahedi, K., & Cressman, D. R. (2000). Capacity building for integrated environmental assessment and reporting: Training manual (Second Edi). International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD); United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP); Ecologistics International, Ltd. Retrieved from http://www.iisd.org/pdf/geo_manual_2.pdf
Gasparatos, A., El-Haram, M., & Horner, M. (2008). A critical review of reductionist approaches for assessing the progress towards sustainability. Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 28(4–5), 286–311. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar.2007.09.002
Lee, N. (2006). Bridging the gap between theory and practice in integrated assessment. Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 26(1), 57–78. http://doi.org/10.1016/J.EIAR.2005.01.001
United Nations Environment Programme. (2004). Integrated Assessment and Planning for Sustainable Development Guidelines for pilot projects, (March), 1–25. Retrieved from http://www.unep.ch/etb/Topics/inteAsse/IAPGuidelinesPilotProjectsEN.pdf
United Nations Environment Programme. (2001). Reference Manual for the Integrated Assessment of Trade-Related Policies., August 28,. Retrieved from http://www.unep.ch/etb/publications/intAssessment/refmaniaFinal.pdf
United Nations Environment Programme. (2009). IEA Training Manual. Integrated Environmental Assessment Training Manual, 28. http://doi.org/10.1016/S0026-0576(07)80624-6.
- SSRP projects using IEA
Suggested citation: Alcamo, J. (2019). Integrated Environmental Assessment [online] Sussex Sustainability Research Programme Research Methods for Sustainability Catalogue. Available at: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/ssrp/resources/research-methods/integrated-environmental-assessment.