2026 Outstanding Service to IAIA Award

Gary Baker, IAIA CEO: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to more awards videos. It’s a very special award that we’re celebrating today, which is the Outstanding Service to IAIA award, and the recipient of that for 2026 is Bryony Walmsley, sitting in South Africa looking quite warm during a heat wave. This is a chance to celebrate an amazing lifetime of service and contributions to IAIA. On a personal note, when I joined IAIA three years ago, Bryony was extremely helpful on showing me the ropes and getting me settled in. So a big thank you from me to Bryony, as well. But let’s go over to Bryony. Bryony, just tell us a little bit about… obviously there’s an awful lot that you could delve into in terms of the time that you’ve had with IAIA, but what would be your highlights? What have you taken from this process?

Bryony Walmsley, Award Winner: Wow, there’s too many to note in 10 minutes. I think every conference has been a highlight for me. The first conference I went to was in 1995 in Durban [South Africa], and then children interrupted for the next five or six years. And then I went in 2003 and haven’t looked back. I’ve been to every conference since then, except for the one in Seoul, South Korea [2007]. Yeah, just meeting up with colleagues who became friends, what you learn, the experiences. And every one has its own little unique highlight — whether it was going up the fjord in Stavanger into a tunnel for a banquet, or sitting in a Bedouin tent in Morocco — every single one has some sort of highlights attached to it, which I remember fondly. I remember them all very well. So yeah, I can’t pick any one moment.

Gary: Maybe a slightly different tack then — how has IAIA dovetailed into your work within impact assessment? Obviously that’s taken you to some pretty extraordinary places and projects, and you’ve given a lot to IAIA. What have you gotten back from being within that community setting?

Bryony: Well, as I said, it’s very much the networking. And I think it’s also the learning from other people’s experience of how did they deal with a certain situation and also sharing your own experiences and getting feedback. So I think it’s always underpinned and always been there as a sort of foundation or framework within which to work as a practice of practitioners who are all trying to aspire to best practice. And so it was a very real, stable basis for the work that we did, knowing that there’s lots of people out there facing the same challenges, having the same failures, the same successes and everything else.

Yeah, there’s another highlight — sitting there, I think it was in Perth [IAIA08 conference session], sitting in the counselor’s/psychiatrist’s chair for a failure, with people recounting some of the absolute disasters in the EIA field – it was one of the funniest things we’ve ever done. Angus, thank you for that, and Francois Retief. So those are some of the things — being able to share and laugh at those things and learn from them. So I think it’s been there — and I joined IAIAsa [South Africa affiliate], I can’t actually find the exact date but it was somewhere in the late 80s — so it’s been there since, and I started practicing in 1980. So for most of my life, my working life, IAIA has been there for me. So I would say that’s one of the best things.

Gary: And clearly one of the things you’ve really taken on a lot of, certainly from what I’ve seen, is that sort of teaching element as well and passing on that knowledge. You’ve done an awful lot on that, and I know you’ve been a big advocate for that. Maybe just looking further ahead, how have you also balanced that practitioner element, teaching element, researching element — is it a case of always wanting to balance all of those or have you sort of gravitated to different things in different stages of your career?

Bryony: Definitely, Gary, I did sort of have a midlife crisis. No, I had a mid-career slight change when I had sold my consulting business. So from 1980 up until 2004, I was doing and practicing all aspects of EIA, but more as the EIA practitioner. And then in 2004, I sold my business and then I joined up with the Southern African Institute for Environmental Assessment. And there we focused far more on external guide and review, training, and research and development. So there was a point there where I kind of pivoted into that. So the latter part of my career, I suppose for the next 20 years, was very much focusing on all of those things — getting very much more involved in policy, institutional strengthening, and so on. But one of my, I think always, favorite aspects was training. I really loved working with the PDP course. I helped John Boyle; I was on the review committee for the development for that. And then I was a PDP mentor from 2017 until last year. And just wonderful meeting up with my students at the various conferences — another highlight was that, and I got a lot of pleasure out of that. And then also training all over Africa. I really loved it. That was a great aspect, which I enjoyed doing.

Gary: Maybe a reflective hat on now – what’s your sense, maybe within South Africa initially, is impact assessment in good health? Are you optimistic about the direction of travel here or what? How would you gauge that?

Bryony: Ooh, Gary, I thought these were supposed to be light questions. That’s a difficult one.

Gary: They are. I mean, you should see my hard list.

Bryony: That’s a difficult one. First of all, I’ve been retired for a year, and I’ve actually switched off completely. So that’s one thing. I do think the world is in a very difficult position right now. Hopefully short-lived, given what’s happening in America — that all the initiatives… I’m very, very sad because a lot of my clients were people like USAID and World Bank and so on. Very, very sad to see some of those fantastic programs which were the lifeblood for Africa being cancelled. So that’s the political note, over and done with. On another note, I think there is still hope. I think there’s enough people still recognize the need for environmental protection for sustainable development and will keep on pushing that agenda. So I’m hoping this is a temporary blip in terms of the global attitude or American attitude towards the environment, climate change, and all of those issues, which is quite depressing. But I think hopefully it’s short lived.

Gary: Maybe one final question — you touched on some of the highlights, but what would be a message to someone setting out in impact assessment now? With your hat of experience on, what would you be telling them at this point as to how to sort of engage and move through/with the industry?

Bryony: I think grab the opportunities. For me, just the opportunities I’ve had to go and visit amazing places. You’ve got to be quite resilient, I think, to go to some places. But you don’t learn unless you go through some of those challenging moments and hardships. I think the resilience is probably the biggest thing, and then grabbing those opportunities to go to interesting places and make a point of learning about the place and people that you are meeting with and having respect for those local communities. I think we sometimes make the mistake of telling people what they should want rather than listening to the communities. And in my experience, that’s a very underrated tool — being able to sit and listen to what people actually want and how they respond to it. So I think it’s going into any development and understanding the environment, both social and the physical environment, that you’re working with, because without that understanding, you can’t possibly make proper recommendations and proper assessments. So learning about where you’re going and what you’re doing and who you’re meeting with is for me critical to a better understanding of impacts of development projects. So that would be my message — resilience and knowledge and learning.

Gary: That is a very good note to finish on really. It just remains for me to say thank you very much. Congratulations on your award. It gives us a very brief taste of Bryony Walmsley’s contributions to IAIA over the years. I’m sure we’ll try and find another venue to sort of examine some of that and maybe a bit more detail at some point. Thanks again, Bryony. Congratulations.

Bryony: Thank you, Gary, and to the Board for nominating me for this prestigious award. I’m very, very honored. Really, I am. Thank you, and a pity I can’t be there in person to collect it.