Changes in the practice of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and advances in information technology have greatly expanded the range of tools available to the EIA practitioner. For example, map overlay methods, originally pioneered by McHarg (1971), have evolved into sophisticated Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Expert systems, a branch of artificial intelligence, have been developed t...

A simplified case study shows how the PCRaster software can be used in the framework of environmental impact assessment. PCRaster comes with generic spatial functions that can be combined in a structured script. This script can be used to 1) define scenarios for human activities, 2) construct static or dynamic (i.e. temporal) spatial environmental models with these scenarios as input, and 3) to...

The upsurge of interest in watershed management and planning has increased the need for user friendly, interactive methods that decision makers can use to evaluate the economic and environmental consequences of alternative land use/management practices (LUMPs). Knowledge and information from several disciplines are integrated into a functional computer-based watershed management decision suppor...

In the environment impacts assessment context, several methods are proposed in literature, such as life cycle analysis, multi criteria analysis and cost benefit analysis etc. Recently, others methods combining MCDA (Multi Criteria Decision Analysis) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) have been explored to develop enhanced methodologies for knowledge based decision support. In this paper, a new ap...

In engineering problems with a weak domain theory, such as environmental evaluation, machine learning techniques should bring to bear any existing background knowledge so as to guide the knowledge acquisition process. This paper proposes an Interactive Inductive Learning System (IILS) which can use background knowledge provided by the experts to avoid many incorrect or incomplete induced heuris...

human activities often adversely affect natural landscapes and ecosystems. natural landscapes consist of habitats, and habitat loss and fragmentation are major threats to biodiversity. environmental impact assessment (eia)as a systematic and well documented procedure to identify, describe and assess the direct and indirect effects of a developmental project in different environments does not co...

BACKGROUND Intersectoral Action for Health (IAH) and its Health Impact Assessment (HIA) tool are built on collaboration between actors and sectors, requiring multidimensional and horizontal way of working. The study aims to analyse the enablers and barriers when such a new way of working and tool have been initiated to replace a traditional, vertical operation at the local level in Slovakia-a c...

Health impact assessments (HIAs) across the globe may be used by governments and industries to secure approval for unconventional gas extraction developments. HIA is an umbrella term that covers an array of health review and assessment practices, ranging from the very general to quite specific and technical health studies. Our concern in this paper is principally with the specialist end of the ...

BACKGROUND In Quebec (Canada), the Monteregie Regional Public Health Department has chosen to use health impact assessment (HIA) to support municipalities through a knowledge exchange and collaborative process in order to positively influence decision-making regarding local policies and projects. The value of HIA is becoming increasingly recognized by municipalities interested in planning and m...