Traditionally, ‘environmental impact assessments’ (EIA) are understood as a process or activity usually conducted before moving forward with a plan. You can think of it like a risk assessment, where the risk is focussed on the environment: what will the consequences for the environment be? This might be used before building a new building or moving to a new data server, for example.
There are also other interpretations of ways that we use the term environmental impact assessment. These can be conducted in parallel with other impact research (e.g. network creation) . It might not necessarily be used as a formative assessment (e.g. to predict environmental cost) but a summative assessment afterwards. This might allow, for example, accurate investment into carbon off-settingto assess the positive or negative impact of an activity on the environment, before or after the activity took place. This is how we are approaching environmental impact assessment in the Europeana Playbook.
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As part of Europeana’s 2019 and 2020 annual conferences, we assessed their environmental impact as physical and digital conferences respectively. You can read more about each impact assessment on Europeana Pro but here we share our approach and methodology. We might think that a digital conference has no environmental impact - after all, there is no travel. But this is not the case. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we held Europeana 2020 online and calculated what the scale of its carbon footprint was likely to be. We compared this against the carbon footprint of air travel to Europeana 2019. In all of this, we had to develop our own methodologies, so each finding is an estimate and over time the methodology is likely to improve.
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