Editorial

Dear readers,

At the time of writing this editorial, I am approaching the end of my first month in my new role as editor of Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal (IAPA). In these first few weeks I have had the privilege to connect with many of you individually and I am grateful to you for sharing with me your insights and views on Impact Assessment (IA) related research and the role that IAPA plays in it. In the coming days and months, I shall endeavour to continue to reach out to more of you. Furthermore, these early days have also provided me with some critical insights. First, I realise the high number of papers that the journal receives which are not relevant to IA and hence has to be rejected. This further helps me to appreciate the work that has been done by our previous editors in maintaining the focus of this journal while increasing the number of articles that are being published. Of course, this means we want more relevant papers being submitted to the journal! It is encouraging to see how popular the ‘letter’ format has been recently, which I believe has the potential in facilitating discussions on topical issues. However, over the years, submissions of ‘Professional Practice Papers’ have somewhat dwindled. Book reviews are also useful in highlighting the relevant publications to our IA audience and it will be great to have more of these. Research Articles continue to be our main focus, however, can I take this opportunity to highlight to all our seasoned authors along with IA academics, students and professionals who are yet to embark their publishing journey with us, to please consider all these different formats in which we accept submissions. There is information available on the journal website as to what is expected from them (see https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?show=instructions&journalCode=tiap20#about-the-journal). If you have any further ideas or suggestions within your area of specialisation in IA, then do not hesitate to get in touch with me.

I intend to keep this editorial short, as we are concluding in this issue Part 2 of the special issue on ‘Advancing the consideration of ecological connectivity in environmental assessment’. I am grateful to Aurora Torres, Charla Patterson and Jochen A.G. Jaeger for serving as our guest editors. Their editorial provides an overview of the special issue and introduces the three papers included here on the subject of ecological connectivity. Thomas Fischer has very kindly continued with his editorial support for this issue.

Additionally, we have three more research articles. The first paper is from New Zealand and looks into Cultural Impact Assessment (CIA) effectiveness. This paper reflects on the CIA experience of the Māori people from the country and contributes to the developing international field of Indigenous IA. The second paper is from Botswana where Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) has been recently introduced. This paper reviews the quality of SEA reports in the country. In the final paper, the authors are proposing a framework for ‘next-generation community-based environmental assessment (NG-CBEA)’ based on four key themes of sustainability, meaningful public participation, follow-up and learning.

Enjoy Reading!