ABSTRACT
Science has been an integral component of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) since its inception in the 1970s. Frameworks for handling scientific uncertainty in EIA have remained influential in much of the literature reviewed, but appear to have had limited application in the context of formal EIA practice. In this chapter, the authors propose that a more robust inquiry into the quality of science in EIA would rely on multiple lines of evidence, including that generated through practitioner surveys, workshops, and EIA document reviews. One long-standing argument has been that poor science in EIA is the result of inadequate scoping. Most importantly, perhaps, emerging ecological concepts and imperatives like biodiversity and climate change have begun to expand EIA's focus on valued ecosystem components that are typically selected on the basis of traditional ecosystem elements. At the same time, related concepts like resilience, thresholds, complexity, and landscape ecology appear to be serving EIA studies only in the background.
