Assessing impacts

The identification of future consequences of a current or proposed action.

The International Association for Impact Assessment (IAIA), founded Jan 1981, in Toronto, aims to bring together those concerned with all forms of impact assessment, including: environmental impact assessment (EIA), risk assessment, social impact assessment (SIA), technology assessment (TA); provide a nonpolitical forum to stimulate innovation in anticipating future consequences of new or modified technologies, developmental projects, and governmental or private sector programmes and products. IAIA has more than 1200 members from 80 countries. IAIA goals are to advance impact assessment, and develop capability to anticipate and manage the consequences of development.

As a specific assessment method, cross-impact analysis is a technique whereby the probability of occurrence of a number of different developments is given expression and the interrelationships between these probabilities are also established within a matrix. Through this network it becomes possible to link various developments and to describe systematically the impact of the realization of a given development on the probabilities of occurrence of other developments. The value of this technique in forecasting and assessment lies primarily in the link it provides between what might otherwise be rather disparate forecasting and assessment efforts. However this technique is only as good as the assignments of approximately correct probability values to the various matrix cells.