Integrated Environmental Assessments (IEA) are powerful tools to help inform the development of evidence-based environmental policy and decision making, bring relevant scientific findings to a broad audience and raise awareness of changing environmental conditions as well as identify emerging environmental issues. Integrated Environmental Assessments also provide a forum for stakeholders, including scientists, policy-makers, and decision-makers to interact and discuss environmental issues and potential solutions.
These guidelines are advisory and provide approaches for conducting a large gamut of integrated environmental assessments for different objectives. They are intended to be practical in application and sensitive to different levels of available resources and objectives and further complement environmental management monitoring and evaluation programmes.