Strategic impact assessment : a new impact assessment method using value engineering and system engineering elements

Impact assessment is an important tool to inform decision makers and stakeholders in advance about the impact their decisions will have. Within the field of impact assessment an aspect-byaspect approach is currently used. For each impact, economic, social and environmental, a different team will write their own report. Links between the impact fields can therefore not be taken into account. The different reports often review different alternatives and may be contradicting. Based on the incomplete, inconsistent and sometimes contradicting information, decision makers currently have to draw their own conclusion about the overall impact of the project. From the impact assessment community there are calls for a new `integrated impact assessment? method. This method should deliver a single document, which reviews all the impact fields. The method should offer traceability, assuring that decisions made uring the impact assessment process are made explicit and traceable. It should make second order effects visible, which are effects caused by the impact of the main project. Finally it should provide the links between the impact fields, making trade-offs between the impacts on different impact fields possible. Based on the observed problems in the impact assessment community, this report asks the question: How can the methods of system engineering and value engineering be integrated with the environmental impact assessment and can the resulting integrated impact assessment method be used to find and solve or mitigate the environmental, social and economic impact of a planned golf resort on St. Eustatius?