These principles are intended to promote "biodiversity-inclusive" impact assessment (IA), including Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for projects, and Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) for policies, plans and programs. They should help practitioners to: integrate biodiversity in IA, decision-makers to commission and review IAs, and other stakeholders to ensure their biodiversity interests are addressed in development planning. Biodiversity is a cross-cutting theme relevant to all fields of IA. These principles should therefore be read in conjunction with the other principles of best practice provided by IAIA (http://www.iaia.org/).