Call for Papers
Special Issue of Environmental Impact Assessment Review
“Environmental Assessment and Industrial Ecology Tools: Exploring Integrative Approaches”
Guest Editors: Ralf Aschemann (University of Graz); Vered Blass (Tel Aviv University); Maria Partidário (University of Lisbon); Paulo Pinho (University of Porto)
This year, environmental impact assessment (EIA) has become 50 years. After half a century of further advancement and specialisation of environmental assessment (EA) into SEA, HIA, SIA etc., it is worthwhile to investigate, how neighbouring research fields of EA might contribute to EA and vice versa. The advantages of such an integrative, cross-border thinking have been argued in several papers, recently (see Blomsma and Brennan 2017, Blass and Corbett 2017, Larrey-Lassalle et al. 2017 or Mazzi et al. 2017).
Thus, the aim of this special issue is to have a deeper look into tools from the worlds of EA and industrial ecology (IE): In particular, potential synergies between EIA and strategic environmental assessment (SEA) on the one hand and life cycle assessment (LCA) and material flow analysis (MFA) on the other hand should be explored.
By doing so, benefits through combining approaches should be identified in order to analyse what both fields mentioned could learn from and how they could contribute to each other. Such integrative, blending approaches could overcome the shortcomings of the usual “silo-thinking” and have the potential to strengthen and foster innovative and bridging ideas, both for EA and IE.
Some illustrating examples of integration approaches are:
- LCA supports the decision-making regarding the environmentally friendliest choice of materials for a construction site, which is subject to an EIA (Lavagna et al. 2018)
- EIA informs an LCA’s inventory phase (Koellner and Geyer 2013)
- MFA enriches the SEA for urban plans (Pinho et al. 2013)
Please submit your contributions until 15 March 2020 via http://www.evise.com/evise/jrnl/EIR and select VSI:Integrating EA and IE when you reach the “enter manuscript information” step in the submission process. Possible article types are “review article” or “full length article”.
It is expected that the Special Issue will be published on 15 December 2020.
Preliminary versions of papers for this special issue might be presented (and discussed) at the session “Blended application of environmental assessment and industrial ecology tools” during the Annual Conference of the International Association for Impact Assessment (IAIA), to be held from 26-29 May 2020 in Seville/Spain (cf. https://conferences.iaia.org/2020/).
References
Blass V, Corbett CJ (2017): Same Supply Chain, Different Models: Integrating Perspectives from Life Cycle Assessment and Supply Chain Management, Journal of Industrial Ecology 22(1), 18-30
Blomsma F, Brennan G (2017): The Emergence of Circular Economy: A New Framing Around Prolonging Resource Productivity, Journal of Industrial Ecology 21(3), 603-614
Koellner T, Geyer R (2013): Global land use impact assessment on biodiversity and ecosystem services in LCA, International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment 18(6), 1185-1187
Larrey-Lassalle P et al. (2017): An innovative implementation of LCA within the EIA procedure: Lessons learned from two Wastewater Treatment Plant case studies, Environmental Impact Assessment Review 63, 95-106
Lavagna M et al. (2018): Benchmarks for environmental impact of housing in Europe: Definition of archetypes and LCA of the residential building stock, Building and Environment 145, 260-275
Mazzi A et al. (2017): The combination of an Environmental Management System and Life Cycle Assessment at the territorial level, Environmental Impact Assessment Review 63, 59-71
Pinho P et al. (2013): Metabolic Impact Assessment for urban planning, Journal of Environmental Plannung and Management 56(2), 178-193
