Human Health in Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA): why the new guidance is so important

Until now, there's been no UK guidance on addressing human health within the context of an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA).

The gap in guidance has hampered sustainable development since 2017, as human health has been on the list of factors an EIA should consider, but without clarity as to how.

Here to address that gap is the latest guidance by the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA). Released in November 2022 'Effective Scoping of Human Health in Environmental Impact Assessment', and 'Determining Significance for Human Health in Environmental Impact Assessment' set out a clear position on:

• Scoping wider determinants of health; and
• Robustly assessing them with consistent and transparent methods.

Developed by leading practitioners, academics, and health impact assessment experts, the IEMA 2022 publications answer a variety of fundamental questions for the first time. And we're proud to share that RPS' Ryngan Pyper, Director of Health and Social Impact, is the first author on both of these industry gold standard publications.

Ryngan comments: "This IEMA 2022 guidance provides long-term certainty for all stakeholders, including developers, impact assessment practitioners, and health stakeholders. And gives much-needed clarity on what is required to achieve sustainable development without unacceptable harm or detriment to the public and society."

The guidance highlights key learnings from health impact assessment good practice publications. It also extends the guidance where necessary for the EIA context, and signposts out to further detail where appropriate, reinforcing the need to use competent experts in EIA for specialist topics such as health.

Ryngan adds: "There is now a clear process for identifying potentially significant, beneficial, or adverse population health effects, and this will usually be explained within a dedicated chapter in the EIA report. The chapter brings together all the relevant ways a population's health may be affected and explains the measures to reduce harm and improve benefits."

With deep expertise spanning two decades, Ryngan has been central to building a consensus with the public health and impact assessment community. This has resulted in a series of seminal publications that have helped in answering the challenge of robustly assessing the wider determinants of health and considering health inequalities as part of EIA:

• IEMA primer on health in EIA, 2017 (Cave et al.)
• IAIA and EUPHA pan-European reference paper on health in EIA, 2020 (Cave et al.)
• IPH guidance on HIA including Health in EIA, 2021 (Pyper et al.)
• WHO leaning from practice case studies on Health in EIA, 2022 (Pyper et al.)
• IEMA Guidance, Health in EIA series, 2022 (Pyper et al.)

For more information on this guidance and EIA, please contact Ryngan.

The full IEMA 2022 guidance is available here:https://lnkd.in/eyD7K2iG