IAIA CEO Gary Baker sat down with Alan Bond, recipient of the 2025 Individual Award. Alan receives this award for his many impressive contributions to both impact assessment and IAIA, which have made him an unprecedented thought leader in the field. As the most published author in the IAPA journal, Alan has also organized many sessions at IAIA conferences and spent years volunteering with IAIA.
Watch the video now (and find the full transcript below).
Gary Baker, IAIA CEO: Hello, again. We are back in the latest in our series of interviews with award winners for 2025. I'm very pleased that we have with us today the recipient of the Individual Award from IAIA, and that is Alan Bond, who is very well known to many, many people. He should be, because that's part of the reason we give Individual Awards—because of the contribution that person has made over several years -- in some cases decades -- for their contribution to both impact assessment and also their work in IAIA. Alan, welcome. Maybe we'll just start with—why don't you tell people what you do and why you're sitting here now?
Alan Bond, Award Winner: What I do is I'm a lecturer at the University of East Anglia, and I run a master's program on Environmental Assessment and Management. I also have an honorary position at Northwest University in South Africa, which allows me to go and do research with them every summer, which is wonderful. Do you want me to talk about the history of why I got here?
Gary: It's interesting to see! Individual Award—it’s this culmination of all sorts of consistent contributions. So it is interesting to see.
Alan: It's a weird backstory, because I've been in it so long now that it goes right back to the roots of environmental assessment in the UK—I should say, not environmental assessment globally. Originally, I got interested in the environment because I was brought up on a farm, and then went to do an Environmental Sciences degree at Lancaster University. From there, I went on to do a PhD, but that PhD was studying lava flows. So my fieldwork was all done in Sicily on Mount Etna. I did that for three years and basically developed a bit of a scam in terms of when I had to do my fieldwork. Getting from Lancaster to Sicily, I tended to have to fly from Gatwick -- oddly, that’s where the planes went from -- and it's really quite expensive getting down to Gatwick. So I developed this system whereby I would apply for jobs in the southeast of England, and if I got an interview -- because they pay the expenses -- I would then set up the fieldwork around that, so I only had to pay for the flights, which tended to be cheaper than actually traveling from Lancaster down to Gatwick and back. One of those jobs I applied for was a two-day interview with Mars Confectionery for a Research Technologist. And you can imagine -- I was so relaxed because I was just there to get the travel money -- that I was offered the job, and therefore took it, because it was a lot of money. So I finished my PhD basically after I'd already started working. So I had three years of making people quite fat and rotting their teeth, and thought, there's got to be something different.
Gary: Time to pay back.
Alan: Yeah. And oddly, I kind of met somebody in a pub who was looking at brochures to go and do a master’s course on environmental assessment in Aberystwyth in Wales. That must have been 1989, I think. So it was brand new—it had been in one year in the UK. Peter Wathern, who wrote the original book "Environmental Impact Assessment: Theory and Practice" had set up a master’s program. And bizarrely, because it was in Wales, I got European Commission funding to go and do an EIA MSc in Aberystwyth.
Gary: Those were the days.
Alan: Yeah, that's where it all started. Because it was so poor in Aberystwyth, you didn’t have to be from there -- as long as you went there to study, they would give you taxpayers’ money to do so. So I already had a PhD, and I went to do a master’s in EIA and never looked back. In fact, I didn’t even finish the master’s -- I did the short stage, which is a diploma. Felt there was no need to do a master’s because I already had a PhD. And immediately launched, working there on a distance learning program on environmental assessment.
Gary: And what were your targets then? Can you think back to what you were aiming for when you’d gone through that interesting in through the back door, or not the front door at least? What were you thinking about with regards to impact assessment at that point?
Alan: It was less to do with it being impact assessment. It was more doing something which was good for the environment. I was an idealistic youth. I wanted to help the environment out, and environmental impact assessment -- clearly because you’re thinking about it in advance -- seemed to do that. But my aspiration, I think, was to be an environmental consultant, and that's why you go and do a course like that. And it’s just that this opportunity came up. Basically, they said, “Look, you can set up this distance learning program to mirror the full-time one, and then we’ll kind of see how that goes.” And that was my route into academia. So it started off with research assistant, very short-term contracts. I had to write eight modules -- so the whole MSc program. Each one took nine weeks, so I basically did them one after the other. But then unfortunately, before I got to the end of the course -- it was ready to... I think I was writing seven and eight at the same time that I was revising one and two, and it just got busier and busier. But yeah, it took off from there. That was really successful. We'd ended up with 30, 40, 50 students on the distance learning program, and we had big residential courses. And on the back of that, I ended up with a full-time appointment there.
Gary: You got into academia. Going forwards, at that point, how much interaction was there between academia and practice/environmental consulting? Or was that separate dreams?
Alan: Not at all. I think there was more engagement -- certainly in the UK then -- than there is now. Because basically what happens at the start -- so this is 1989, 1990, 1991 -- it’s brand new, environmental assessment. So nobody knows how to do it. Some of the people that I did the course with went on to become -- most of them went on to become -- consultants. But you've got to think of the other stakeholders, like the competent authorities, that was mainly the local authorities, and they didn’t know how to do EIA either. So the people I was working with at Aberystwyth -- so this wasn’t me leading it, it was other people I worked with as well as myself -- we trained probably a third of all the local authorities in the country. So we had screening case studies and scoping case studies and review -- the same sort of things that we run in the master’s program still today. And that’s basically how we built capacity, because nobody had capacity. Of course, around that time the Institute of Environmental Assessment started, which later on became IEMA when it merged with the Institute of Environmental Management. So we had a really nice community of practice, where people would get together -- there used to be an active UK-Ireland Branch -- and really talk about what we could do to make the whole process better. Now, my understanding of how policy develops is that there is this typical life cycle of when something is new, government invests in it. So you could also apply for grants from research councils and get money to study EIA. Government would also tender for contracts, and you could win those. So you could do a lot of real research, which was practice-relevant, and focus on practice and work with different stakeholders. But then when it becomes mature, government pulls out and they expect other groups to basically take over, which is where we are in the UK. But I think not everywhere -- I know in Ireland it's still that the Irish EPA funds a lot of research. And I see community practice in South Africa, and I see one in Croatia, and they still have them in other countries. So now, I think, in the UK, it's actually not quite the same community of practice that it used to be. It’s not that it’s disappeared, but I don’t think it's as strong as it used to be. And it's difficult to engage with government policymakers.
Gary: At what point did you get more involved in IAIA?
Alan: 1996 was my very first conference in Estoril in Portugal. It was a bit more modest then in terms of the numbers of people who would turn up. But it's like any organization -- there are opportunities for anybody to engage if they wish. So I think I got involved in the Publications Committee -- chaired the Publications Committee -- that had the task of trying to get IAPA listed on the ISI database so that it would have an impact factor. That took years. It was a really quite long-winded process, and a lot of good IAIA members helped with that, where it was successful ultimately. Then I helped with -- depending on where my research was going -- involvement with different Sections. So I used to be quite active in the Health Impact Assessment Section, less so these days. A lot of it depends on the research you’re doing, what your focus is, which angle you take.
Gary: Obviously IAPA has always been important -- you've produced a lot of publications within that. But more recently, I've seen you within the financial taxonomy, and then most recently with emerging technologies and AI. Again, is that a reflection of where your research has gone? General interest? Or what?
Alan: A bit of both. Opportunities come along. Emerging technologies and sustainable finance -- you'll be aware, Gary, the driving force behind that has been Jiri Dusik, who I know quite well. And therefore, just through speaking to him -- he talks about particular opportunities or exciting areas to investigate, and asks whether I'm interested in cooperating or collaborating on particular topics. And at that point, the beauty of being an academic is that I can decide what I spend my time on. So if someone like Jiri comes along and makes a convincing case that there’s an interesting area to investigate, I can just say yes. And that’s basically what happened with emerging technologies and sustainable finance in particular, which is going through a bit of an interesting development with the emergence of the taxonomy. We were really excited at the beginning, and now it’s becoming somewhat political.
Gary: There we go. It has its own life cycle. So what lies ahead, then? Where are the ambitions still?
Alan: That’s a really good question. I’ve been in the field so long now. I’ve never had a kind of aspiration to focus on any particular area, because it never works that way in environmental assessment. What really sets my job apart from other ones that I’ve had -- like when I worked for Mars Confectionery -- is that you can be entirely led by your own motivations and interests. And the idea that they’re going to stay the same, I think, is a little bit naïve. So I don’t think, “This is going to be my focus and I’m going to stick with it and achieve something in particular,” because in a year’s time, something new will come up which will be more interesting than what I’m working on this week. And I wouldn’t want to be stuck in a rut and be unable to move. I think that is just the joy of being an academic. And of course, I do consultancy, but I can pick and choose what kind of consultancy I focus on. So I think my aspirations are just to continue to matter and do something which is useful. I only take on work if I think I agree with the ethical approach, if aspirations might coincide with my own, or if I think I can do something useful. And over the years, you become more realistic. I stopped engaging with projects thinking I’m going to change the world now, because I failed to do that on virtually every project. But you never know, so I keep holding on to this hope that when I do something -- particularly when I work with policymakers -- that one day someone will listen, and there will be something come out of the kind of engagement I have where I can see that I’ve made a difference. I'm still waiting.
Gary: I think that is a very good note on which to finish. A huge thank you for your contributions to the world of impact assessment, to IAIA in particular. It's a very richly deserved award. So thank you very much, Alan.
Alan: Absolute pleasure. It’s actually very humbling to be given the award. So thank you very much. I look forward to you handing it over in person in Bologna.
