ABSTRACT
Impact assessment is increasingly becoming – mostly by statutory obligation but also for reasons of good practice – part and parcel of more and more development proposals in the United Kingdom and in Europe. For instance, while the Department of the Environment (DoE) in Britain was expecting about 50 Environmental Statements each year when this new practice was introduced in 1988, the annual number soon exceeded 300. As the practice of IA developed, it became more standardised and good practice started to be defined. In the early years – late 1980s – a proportion of Environmental Statements in the UK still showed relatively low level of sophistication and technical know-how, but the quality soon started to improve (Lee and Colley, 1992; DoE, 1996; Glasson et al., 1997), largely due to the establishment and diffusion of expertise, even though the overall quality is still far from what would be desirable. And it is here that the idea of expert systems becomes suggestive.
