How can impact assessment better account for an altering landscape, climate resilience, and future ecological change?
Landscape-scale assessment is promoted as a solution to addressing cumulative impacts of development and reversing/halting environmental decline. How will we know we have been successful in achieving this? What are we measuring against when often there are broad assumptions or limited / inconsistent information on current environmental conditions? Is climate change, and indeed other existing or future threatening processes, receiving sufficient attention within bioregional planning, strategic environmental assessment, and other landscape-scale focused mechanisms in legislative reforms in Australia and New Zealand. What does this mean for the long-term effectiveness of environmental decision-making? Drawing on recent reforms, observations, and practitioner experience, this will involve discussion on how impact assessment can better account for an altering landscape, climate resilience, and future ecological change.
Warren is a Technical Director for Environmental Science at Beca Pty Ltd based in Sydney, Australia with 27 years of experience across EIA, SEA, offsets, climate resilience and ecological restoration.