3.1 Goal and Characteristics

Impact assessment is a technical, quantitative and/or qualitative process for classifying, characterizing and assessing the effects of resources required for production and any associated environmental laudably, such an assessment should address ecological impacts, human health impacts and resource depletion, as well as effects such as habitat modification and noise pollution.

Ecological assessment of environmental interventions and, therefore, the reduction of numerous available physical measures to just a few units or even one unit of measurement, should occur only after aggregation has been carried out for each identified environmental interventions site. The advantage of this approach is that different assessment methods can be based on the same inventory data and then compared with each other. For this reason, ecological accounting is not restricted by today’s level of knowledge about environmental harm caused by environmental interventions; it also allows new weights to be applied at a later time.

It would be desirable for an impact assessment to take into account direct, indirect, parallel and serial impacts as well as spatial, time, social, political and economic aspects so far however the complexity of the material allows only some of these criteria to be included.

Today, many disciplines (e.g. natural sciences engineering and economic), universities, research institutes, environmental consultants, environmental protection agencies EEAA (EGYPT) the USA, Canadian, Danish, Dutch, German and Swiss environmental protection agencies are among those most active in the area of ecological accounting ) and   working groups with activities that are international (in scope) handle measures and criteria for environmental impact assessment and promote their own concepts. Over the past decade, impact assessment has emerged as a highly interdisciplinary field of research.

So far, there is no consensus among researchers or users, although much research has been competing. Moreover, the proponents of different assessment approaches are competing with each other to find the best approach. Competition is not merely at the scientific level, because several groups are also strongly lobbying regulators, environmental protection agencies, and international organizations and other opinion leaders.

As a result of the lack of an acknowledged ecological accounting standard-setting committee, recommendation and guidelines exist today, but there are no standards the political nature of decision-making has to be recognized as a constraint on standard-setting, especially where ecological issues are complex and where numerous competing stakeholders are engaged in the sociopolitical process. The lack of standards acts as a threat to the implementation and achievement of sustainable outcomes, to transparent accountability relationships and to attempts to meet the challenge of sustainability the issue is therefore considered in more detail in the next section.

3.2 Approaches to Impact Assessment

Many different approaches to impact assessment have been published and numerous variations are available in practice. Differences between the approaches are caused mainly by fact that different researchers (scientists) ask different questions. In the past, the wide variety of assessment methods was perceived as a problem and a single, objective approach to assessment was judged to be most desirable. However, environmental impacts are, in fact viewed in different ways (through different lenses) by different social groups that recorded data need to be interpreted with use of different assessment concepts. When comparing impact assessment methods, it is important to realize that different methods provide answers to different questions. Table 3.1 surveys the main approaches to the impact assessment. 

Table 3.1: The main approaches to the impact assessment

3.2.1 Non- Monetary Approaches 

A first group of assessment approaches covers non-monetary impact assessment concepts. These methods can be distinguished as being oriented towards natural science and sociopolitical concerns. The former can be subdivided into energy- oriented and volume- oriented methods that can be distinguished by their approaches to classification and characterization. 

3.2.2 Socioeconomic (Monetary) Approaches

The group of monetary impact assessment concepts has evolved from socioeconomic research and can broadly be split into direct and indirect methods for measuring people’s preferences. The second group of concept based on market valuation of environmental protection against environmental interventions. The first set approaches attempts to measure people’s preferences directly by using laboratory experiments or contingent valuation methods. Monetary approaches have rarely been applied to impact assessment and ecological accounting at a corporate level. However, corporative (commercial) organizations in the public sector have experimented with the monetized concept. 

Damage-oriented impact assessment methods measure the monetary caused by environmental damage (e.g. a forest). They are ex-post economic measures that are mostly used prove the severity of environmental intervention to politicians.  

The expense-oriented assessment method provides an answer to the question of which direct specific environmental assets (e.g. a lake or a species).

The market-price method asks what costs people would accept to repair costs) or prevent (prevention costs) environmental damage or to protect themselves against environmental interventions e.g. buying noise protection devices). 

People can also be asked about their preference as to environmental quality. This can be tested directly in an artificial laboratory situation or through contingent valuation approaches which ask about activities or problems that occur in concrete situations.  

The basic questions raised in socioeconomic assessment methods are summarized in Table 3.2, Monetary assessment methods do not explicitly take indirect, antagonistic or synergetic environmental impacts into account although they might theoretically be taken into account under the heading of citizens’ “willingness to pay“ or "willingness to accept" .  

Nonetheless, it must be assumed that time and spatial differences of environmental impacts are included in the valuations. All monetary assessment methods have to contend with the problem that derived monetary values cannot be linked to single environmental interventions.  Compared with non-monetary concepts, results are not sufficiently desegregated. However, it is possible to link monetary with non-monetary assessment approaches to derive financial values for environmental interventions This can be achieved by determining monetary values for specific classes of environmental impacts ( e.g. the greenhouse effect ) to thereby allowing the relative  contribution of different interventions (e.g. CO₂ and methane) to be traced back to particular environmental problem in question. Hence, monetaristion of the environmental interventions linked with specific environmental problems is possible.  Table 3.2 shows the monetary assessment methods of the socio-economic approaches.

Table 3.2: Monetary assessment methods of socio-economic approach 

Keywords definitions