IAIA CEO Gary Baker shares takeaways from Dubrovnik symposium
One of the key strategic aims for IAIA is to raise awareness and the external profile of impact assessment. Conferences are an important venue for this sort of activity, offering a chance to highlight and explore interlinkages with other key industries.
I recently had a chance to participate in one such event—an international symposium in Dubrovnik, under the RSFIA platform, exploring the links between sustainable finance and environmental standards. The event was organised by HUSZPO, with support from EIB, UNDP, World Bank Group, and the International Sustainable Finance Centre. While it was EU-centred, given the momentum created by the EU Commission in advancing the EU Green Deal, it was a logical place to start.
The challenge was laid out very clearly in the opening session: how to harmonize and leverage the obvious linkages between EU taxonomy/the EU green agenda and existing, seasoned environmental procedures.
This broad topic is a crowded field with many (often competing) interests. A snapshot of actors in the room includes the EU Commission, private sector, public sector, multilateral development banks (and their associated E&SF guidance), IFIs (Equator Principles), SEA/EIA practitioners at the project level, and the increasing imperative to include social assessment within statutory EIA.
To cut to a conclusion, I came away convinced that there is a huge opportunity for IAIA in several areas:
- raising IA awareness amongst financiers;
- providing training on financial taxonomy to IA practitioners (already underway in our pre-conference training events);
- and, perhaps most urgently, acting as a neutral broker in trying to avoid the unnecessary duplication of efforts seeking to harmonise and improve the inter-operability of different sustainability performance measurements, reporting, and standards.
This is not an undertaking for the faint-hearted. An illustration of the complexity of finding useful linkages between the ‘competing systems’ is provided by the world of acronyms to which one is immediately confronted—CSRD, NFRD, SEA, EIA, ESS, DNSH—plus the gravitational pull of a new EU Commission, EU Taxonomy, and Draghi report.
But by the end of Day 2, the challenges felt much less daunting. Having listened to the rationale for the data being gathered on all sides, the potential synergies of incorporating what is already being done (tweaking where required) with the ambition of what is to come felt very compelling.
Whatever our starting point, we are all seeking the same: greater transparency, quality, and verification of data to inform better decision-making, generating positive outcomes for all stakeholders. Some of the ideas to assimilate include:
- the role that SEA/SESAs can play in National Plans as EU directives are transposed.
- the richness of data (and procedural rigor) gathered during a project-level Environmental (& Social) Impact Assessment.
- the key role of the Environmental & Social Standards administered by World Bank/IFC and how these dominate public and private sector applications (particularly outside of the EU).
- the influence of these standards on other MDB/UN/vertical funds.
- the ambition and rationale of the EU Taxonomy and imminent first wave of reporting under CSRD.
- the accountability the Do No Significant Harm (DNSH) principle will impose on large, listed corporates.
To establish harmonisation, inter-operability, and alignment, players clearly have to be encouraged (or lured?) out of (defensive) silos. We all need to be prepared to cede ground and relinquish a need/desire to have our ‘own’ standards and to acknowledge what is already working and proven, probably most notably the ESS framework guiding the work of MDBs/vertical funds.
Next steps could involve trying to convene a closed-door meeting of key parties to see how to sketch out a path to a possible common framework. We won’t know unless we try.
A couple of other personal observations emerging from the symposium:
- Data is clearly a huge challenge in every sense: definitional, collection, ownership, presentation, storage, access, verification, and assurance. XBRL for CSRD will start to lay some foundations to greater application of technology but there is so much more to do (linking to our theme for #IAIA25: “Impact assessment in the age of artificial intelligence”).
- And a word on social. There was (repeated) universal agreement on the need for explicit focus on both social and environmental within all assessment (i.e., embedding it within SESA/ESIA and extending the scope of the Taxonomy—kudos to Alka Patel at the World Bank for being such a loud voice on this). But my final ‘social’ exhortation on the panel I was on was for delegates to not lose sight of why we are engaged in this process, and to ensure that PEOPLE stay at the core of what we are doing—not systems, not checklists, but people.
