Session Description
For more than five decades, impact assessment has helped inform environmental and social decision-making worldwide. However, the context in which impact assessment operates has fundamentally changed. Despite its evolution, impact assessment is still too often treated as a compliance exercise rather than as a dynamic decision-support process that enables sustainable and equitable development.
With the current challenges of climate uncertainties, social inequalities, cumulative impacts, changing environmental baselines, accelerating infrastructure development, growing stakeholder expectations and rapid technological advancement, impact assessment needs to shift from mere compliance-driven paperwork to a proactive tool for achieving sustainability and just outcomes. This is imperative to ensure that decisions are effective in the face of uncertainties and evolving challenges.
This session introduces the concept of the "next generation of impact assessment"—one that is adaptive, learning-oriented, AI-enabled, inclusive, and capable of responding to rapidly changing environmental and societal conditions. AI is considered not as a replacement for professional judgement, but as one of several enablers of more adaptive, transparent and evidence-based impact assessment.
The session will foster dialogue among practitioners, researchers, regulators, industry and communities on how impact assessment can evolve to remain relevant, credible and effective in an AI-enabled and rapidly changing world.
Session Summary
This session explores Next Generation of Impact Assessment through adaptive learning, AI-enabled decision support, dynamic baselines and inclusive knowledge systems to strengthen resilient, equitable and sustainable environmental decision-making in a rapidly changing world.
Session Chair
Chizoba Chinweze
Chemtek Associates Limited
Nigeria
Session Co-chair
Ijeoma Vincent-Akpu
University of Port-Harcourt, Rivers State. Nigeria
Nigeria