This document examines four different Impact Assessment approaches that are used in Canada, including Health Impact Assessment, Environmental Impact Assessment, Strategic Environmental Assessment, and Risk Assessment.
Various types of impact assessment are practised in Canada and abroad, in order to identify the unintended effects of public- and private-sector initiatives on human health and/or on the environment.
The existence of a large variety of impact assessments has led to a certain amount of confusion (Rattle, 2009), as there are no definite separations between approaches. The objective of this table is to clarify four different approaches that are used in Canada: Health Impact Assessment (HIA), Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) and Risk Assessment (RA).
This table provides a general sense of what four types of impact assessment used in Canada try to achieve, and how.
