ABSTRACT
ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENTS ARE increasingly important and complex endeavors designed to harness scientifically grounded information to inform decisionmaking for businesses, local and national governments, and international arenas. For the purposes of this book, environmental assessment refers to the entire social process by which expert knowledge related to a policy problem is organized, evaluated, integrated, and presented in documents to inform policy choices or other decisionmaking (Farrell et al. 2001). Although one might think first of assessments in terms of the reports they often produce, the research presented in this book reveals that the implications of scientific assessment are better understood by viewing assessments as a communication process, rather than just as a report. Assessment, therefore, is a process that bridges expert knowledge to policy and seeks to inform policymakers and the scientific community.
