Abstract
Health impact assessment (HIA) practice has expanded across the world, since it was established more than two decades ago. This paper presents a snapshot of current global HIA practice based on the findings of an online questionnaire survey. HIA practitioners from all world regions were invited to participate. A total of 122 HIA practitioners from 29 countries completed the survey, following a broad international outreach effort. The large variety in the types of HIAs conducted, and the application of HIA in various fields reported by respondents, demonstrates that HIA practice has evolved over the past two decades. Although differences in the use of HIA were reported across world regions, an overall increasing trend in global HIA practice can be observed. In order to sustain this upward trend, efforts are needed to address the main barriers in the utilisation of HIA. The establishment of new national and international HIA teaching and training offerings seems to be an obvious strategy to pursue along with the strengthening of policies and legal frameworks that specify the circumstances, under which HIA is required, and to what extent.
Highlights
Increasing recognition of the manifold implications of human-induced policies, plans, programmes, or projects on the environment led to the development of the environmental impact assessment (EIA) approach as an important component of environmental management in the 1960s [1,2]
The proportion of Health impact assessment (HIA) practitioners who participated from the different world regions seems to match well with other relatively recent descriptions of global HIA practice [6,13,30,31,32]; all pointing out that HIA practice is most developed in the European region, North America, the Asia region, and Australia
For sustaining and further expanding the observed upward trend in HIA use globally, efforts are needed to address the main barriers in HIA use, namely (i) the limited technical expertise and capacity for conducting HIA; (ii) the lack of policies and legal frameworks that regulate the use of HIA or health in other forms of impact assessment; and (iii) the inadequate knowledge about HIA by decision-makers and public health specialists
Summary
Increasing recognition of the manifold implications of human-induced policies, plans, programmes, or projects on the environment led to the development of the environmental impact assessment (EIA) approach as an important component of environmental management in the 1960s [1,2]. With the enactment of a revolutionary piece of legislation, namely the National Environmental Policy. Act, promulgated in 1969, the United States of America became the first country that established a comprehensive legal basis for EIA. While most countries followed the example of the United States. Res. Public Health 2020, 17, 2988; doi:10.3390/ijerph17092988 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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