دانلود ترجمه مقاله بالاترین سطح ارزیابی اثر در سال ۲۰۱۲ - مجله تیلور و فرانسیس

This special issue of Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal aims to present the state of the art of a number of impact assessment tools. It is timely given that environmental impact assessment is now 42 years old (beginning on 1 January 1970 when President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act in the USA). It updates the last International Association for Impact Assessment (IAIA) overviewof the field that was published in 1995 (Vanclay and Bronstein), which preceded the 1996 International Effectiveness Study (Sadler 1996). The Effectiveness Study itself has been updated, but, at the time of press, any conclusions are still pending. The initial problem for the editors was to decide the appropriate focus for papers, as only six could be selected, which suggests we havemade judgements about the relative importance of various types of impact assessment. We decided not to include papers that dealt with generic types of impact assessment, or components of impact assessment, that could be applicable to any process, so cumulative effects assessment was not included, nor was public participation, despite our acknowledgement of their importance. Several of the papers in this special edition do address these concerns in relation to their specific topics, however. Determining which forms of impact assessment should then be the focus was no easy choice; we considered ecological impact assessment, climate impact assessment and technology assessment among others. We acknowledge that our choices could have been very different, and some readers may not agree with them, but we chose to consider some forms of assessment originally covered by Vanclay and Bronstein for which we were aware there was extensive practice globally, as well as two newcomers that we believe have now achieved this status. So this issue covers the state of the art of environmental impact assessment (EIA), strategic environmental assessment (SEA), policy assessment, social impact assessment (SIA), health impact assessment (HIA) and sustainability assessment, where SEA and sustainability assessment have emerged as significant bodies of theory and practice since the publication of Vanclay and Bronstein (1995). We have left open the possibility of producing a further issue dealing with some of the impact assessment processes we could not consider on this occasion.