Guidelines for conducting integrated environmental assessment

Abstract

<p>Integrated Environmental Assessments (IEA) are powerful tools to help inform the development of evidence-based environmental policy and decision making, bring relevant scientific findings to a broad audience and raise awareness of changing environmental conditions as well as identify emerging environmental issues. Integrated Environmental Assessments also provide a forum for stakeholders, including scientists, policy-makers, and decision-makers to interact and discuss environmental issues and potential solutions.</p> <p>Integrated Environmental Assessments have been part of the environmental management landscape following up on the Resolution 2997 of the 1972 United Nations (UN) Conference on The Human Environment, Stockholm, that stated, in part, that UNEP "should keep the global environment under review". These assessments have grown to become a major and common feature of environmental management conducted by various stakeholders. For these assessments to be most useful, they must be performed in a consistent manner. For this reason, Member States of the United Nations Environment Programme (UN Environment) requested that guidelines be developed for conducting Integrated Environmental Assessments.</p> <p>These guidelines are advisory and provide approaches for conducting a large gamut of integrated environmental assessments for different objectives. They are intended to be practical in application and sensitive to different levels of available resources and objectives and further complement environmental management monitoring and evaluation programmes.</p>