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Integrated environmental assessment (IEA) is an active and rapidly developing field. It involves scientists and decision makers from a diversity of backgrounds and communities. Many approaches to this complicated but promising field co-exist. In order to have integrated environmental assessment bear its best possible fruits, cross-fertilisation of the various approaches practised in this field and community building are needed. By involving scientists and decision makers from a diversity of backgrounds and communities, the network of the Concerted Action EFIEA serves this purpose.

Integrated environmental assessment (IEA) is an active and rapidly developing field. It involves scientists and decision makers from a diversity of backgrounds and communities. Many approaches to this complicated but promising field co-exist. In order to have integrated environmental assessment bear its best possible fruits, cross-fertilisation of the various approaches practised in this field and community building are needed. By involving scientists and decision makers from a diversity of backgrounds and communities, the network of the Concerted Action EFIEA serves this purpose. More than 40 institutes in the EU, Canada and the USA take part in this programme, involving numerous researchers and policy-makers.

FEEM is part of the Steering Committee which is the decision-making body of EFIEA-II. The Steering Committee – including representatives of DG Environment, DG Research and the European Environment Agency – meets regularly, face-to-face during EFIEA workshops and by telephone conference and selects topics for EFIEA workshops, appointing also a workshop host and workshop organizing committee.

Integrated environmental assessment (IEA) can be defined as policy-relevant, multi-disciplinary research on complex environmental issues. If perfect, IEA is the holy grail of applied researchers and policy makers alike. This explains why the application of integrated assessment approaches is rapidly gaining ground.

Policy makers, faced with complex environmental problems that cross the boundaries of academic disciplines, demand sound science to inform their decisions.

Researchers are attracted by the intellectual challenge of building bridges between disciplines and between the academic world and society.

Started in acidification, and further developed in climate change, IEA is now beginning to be applied to a range of issues, including water, land use, nutrients, and health as well as the linkage between these issues. However, current IEA practices are far from perfect. This imperfection partly reflects the complexities of this type of research and policy advice. The field has also suffered from a lack of established practices, while the diversity of approaches has led to confusion and strife. For want of a critical peer community, IEA practitioners have reinvented wheels and repeated mistakes. To avoid all this in the future, a concerted action of IEA practitioners, mostly researchers in academia and national laboratories, and IEA clients, mostly strategic environmental policy makers, is needed.

Strengthening the network of leading European environmental research institutes actively engaged in integrated environmental assessment can be seen as an important step towards a European Research Area in this field.

The two main objectives of EFIEA are to improve the scientific quality of integrated environmental assessment and to strengthen the interaction between environmental science and policy. In addition, the EFIEA fosters co-operation between scientists and decision makers inside the European Union, communication and co-operation outside the EU, and training on IEA techniques.

The potential benefits of the EFIEA include the improvement of the practice of integrated environmental assessment, with respect to both scientific quality and policy relevance. With the EFIEA, the practice of integrated environmental assessment will be better equipped to live up to its triple challenge:

  • to be up-to-date with regard to disciplinary research;
  • to be cutting-edge with regard to multidisciplinary integration;
  • to answer the right policy question in an understandable manner.

By fostering a collaborative network of scientists, decision makers and stakeholders concerned with complex environmental issues, necessary information flows would be enhanced in quantity and quality. With better and more information, it is expected that better research will be conducted, better decisions will be made, and unnecessary damaging negative public responses to industrial or policy developments will be avoided.

At the moment, the EFIEA is a network of more than hundred scientists conducting multi-disciplinary, policy-relevant research on complex environmental issues. It is hoped to extend the existing network, particularly towards government, industry, NGOs, etc. The network started its work centered around climate related topics, but it has broadened its scope to include topics like water, transport, and agriculture. It also studies interactions between climate and other EU policies as related to the EU-enlargement with countries from Central Europe, trade, internal market, air-pollution and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Furthermore, it will be explored in EFIEA-II whether IEA has added value in other domains as well, like food and health, biodiversity, land use and agriculture, resource management and waste.

The above mentioned objectives will be reached through many joint activities, culminating in thirteen different workshops, for which many papers and presentations will be prepared. The results will be published amongst others in booklets, brochures, and web sites, and they will be widely disseminated.