Teaching impact assessment: applying indicators of best practice principles to Brazil

ABSTRACT

Teaching Impact Assessment (IA) is both important and challenging. In this context, international literature presents a set of Best Practice Principles for IA Teaching and Training. This paper proposes and applies a framework of 14 indicators to analyse the content of IA teaching. It focuses on the Brazilian Environmental Engineering Programs, and the methodological process involved examining the literature as well as content analysis. The framework application showed to be practical and objective. Results indicate that the capacity to incorporate the specifics of the IA system is a strength of IA teaching in Brazil. On the other hand, the results highlight many weaknesses, e.g. the focus on teaching only IA applied to projects (in spite of the many IA types present in IA literature and international practice), focus on impact assessment statement (instead of the whole IA process) and gaps related to study of alternatives, cumulative impacts and public participation. Suggestions to improve IA teaching in Brazil include presenting IA as a process.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental impact assessment
• environmental assessment
• training
• education
• Brazil