Integrated assessment

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<section begin=glossary />

Integrated assessment is a multidisciplinary process of synthesizing knowledge across scientific disciplines with the purpose of providing all relevant information to decision makers to help to make decisions.

The integration takes place:

• integration across causal chains
• integration of aggregated indicators
• integration of outcomes: disease, money perception
• integration of many pollutants
• integration across many risk assessments
• integration across policy studies/areas
• integration across scientific disciplines
• integration across sources
• integration across pollutants/stressors
• integration across impacts/receptors
• integration across environmental media
• integration across scales <section end=glossary />

• A multidisciplinary process of synthesizing knowledge across scientific disciplines with the purpose of providing all relevant information to support policy decision making

• "What does it mean for assessment to be integrated? Again, the answer is highly context-specific. The only general answer is that to be integrated is to present a broader set of information than standard research activity, more than typical good research from a single discipline. (...) This guide defines integrated assessment broadly. The two defining characteristics are a) that it seeks to provide information of use to some significant decision-maker rather than merely advancing understanding for its own sake; and b) that it brings together a broader set of areas, methods, styles of study, or degrees of certainty, than would typically characterize a study of the same issue within the bounds of a single research discipline." (Consortium for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at http://sedac.ciesin.org/mva/iamcc.tg/TGHP.html)

• "Probably the most succinct definition is that IEA (integrated environmental assessment) is an interdisciplinary and policy-oriented synthesis of scientific information (first part) with some qualifications (second part). While there is a considerable degree of agreement on the first part: IEA is interdisciplinary and aims at producing policy-relevant results, significant disagreements start when one adds qualifications." (Ferenc L. Toth and Eva Hizsnyik: Integrated environmental assessment methods: Evolution and applications. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). Environmental Modeling and Assessment 3. 1998. p. 193–207)

• 1st Year Report:
  The earliest published formulation of the concept of integrated assessment was in the 1960s in the context of climate change, and since then it has become a relatively well established approach in the areas of environmental change and environmental policy. It underpins, for example, the work of the European Environment Agency. In this context, it has been defined as follows:
  Integrated assessment (IA) is a reflective and iterative participatory process that links knowledge (science) and action (policy) regarding complex global change issues such as acidification and climate change. IA can be defined as an interdisciplinary process of combining, interpreting and communicating knowledge from diverse scientific disciplines in such a way that the whole cause–effect chain of a problem can be evaluated from a synoptic perspective with two characteristics: (i) it should have added value compared to single disciplinary assessment; and (ii) it should provide useful information to decision makers….. The cause effect chains that IA aims to evaluate start with socio-economic drivers, leading to economic activity and other practices, leading to emissions and other pressure on the environment, leading to environmental changes, leading to physical impacts on societies and ecosystems, leading to socioeconomic impacts, eventually returning to change the socioeconomic drivers. Therefore, IA needs to integrate insights from a multitude of disciplines to arrive at a synoptic view on the problem at hand. (from J.P. van der Sluijs in Encyclopaedia of global environmental change)