The Journal begins with articles from early career IA professionals exploring how competency and having structures supporting how to achieve it can help your journey as an IA professional. Millie Hartridge from Mott MacDonald provides advice for those new to IA in relation to EIA competency and certification, after which there is a co-authored article from Lisa Nelson and Omar Hallab from RPS, reflecting on how IEMA’s new advice on health competent experts can help growth and career planning.

The next articles draw on IEMA’s core UK membership and link to the EIA process. The first sees Mark Cope, RSK Environment’s Associate Director of EIA, dive straight into the critical question: what makes a competent EIA coordinator? Mark provides a call to arms to IEMA’s EIA members to band together and develop a clear position statement on this professional role. Mike Spence of MS Envision provides a similar perspective but through the lens of the capabilities needed by those in the landscape architecture profession who lead Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment (LVIA) within EIA and more widely.

In the next two UK-oriented articles, we pivot away from role and, instead, look at progress in a specific sector and in one of the UK’s devolved nations. First is an article about the competencies needed across the professionals contributing to IA work in marine consenting, co-authored by Julia Thompson of Ramboll and Fiona Brown at ABP. The next article is from me—Josh Fothergill—in which I discuss my experiences across four years of helping Northern Ireland’s government enhance EIA capacity across its planning system.

We then turn to how the increasing pace and penetration of digital technologies, including the more recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in IA is driving a shift in capability needs for our profession. Ruth Henderson at Royal HaskoningDHV provides her in-depth perspectives on how the EIA coordinator role has had to get ‘tech-savvy’. Ellen Selley from Buro Happold then presents a complementary piece on how EIA roles, from graduate to senior, need to upskill to enable the digital approaches that are now at the forefront of practice. 

The latter part of Volume 22 draws together perspectives from international IA practice. The first is from Mark King of King Sustainability who takes from his previous leadership roles including Chief Officer for Environmental & Social Standards at the World Bank and Director of Policy and Project Oversight at EBRD to consider the challenges of finding quality E&S professionals in the work of financial institutions.

Our final pair of articles draw on IEMA’s new membership alliance with the Environment Institute of Australia and New Zealand (EIANZ). In the first, Lachlan Wilkinson from JBS&G Australia dives into the history and approach to the accreditation of IA practitioners across Australia and New Zealand. The second article from Erica van den Honert of the New South Wales (NSW) Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure and Fiona Gainsford of Gainsford Environmental Consulting, explains how EIANZ’s accreditation system allowed the State of NSW to implement mandatory certification of EIA into its regulatory requirements and how this is working in practice.

Download a copy of the Outlook Journal here.

If you are interested in being involved in IEMA Impact Assessment Network, joining an IA Working Group, or editing or contributing to a future Impact Assessment Outlook Journal, IEMA members can email [email protected].

Please note: the views expressed in this blog are those of the individual contributing member and are not necessarily representative of the views of IEMA or any professional institutions with which IEMA is associated.