The EFIEA network aims to improve the practice of Integrated Environmental Assessment in Europe, and to build bridges between science and policy. It involves institutions, individual researchers and policymakers representing a variety of disciplines and countries. Ecologic staff have contributed to several EFIEA workshops; in addition, Ecologic supports the organisation of the EFIEA final conference in Berlin.

The idea of the European Forum on Integrated Environmental Assessment (EFIEA) developed through debates at workshops and meetings initiated and held in Brussels. The EFIEA was launched in 1997. The first three-year period of EFIEA was largely financed by DG Research in the period from early 1998 until early 2001.

EFIEA-II is again a so-called Concerted Action financed largely by DG Research for another three years period, starting in April 2002. More than 40 institutes in the EU, Canada and the USA take part in this programme, involving numerous researchers and policy-makers.

Integrated environmental assessment (IEA) is an active and rapidly developing field. It involves scientists and decision makers from a diversity of backgrounds and communities. Many approaches to this complicated but promising field co-exist. In order to have integrated environmental assessment bear its best possible fruits, cross-fertilisation of the various approaches practised in this field and community building are needed. The network of the European Forum on Integrated Environmental Assessment (EFIEA) serves such a goal.

The two main objectives of EFIEA are:

• to improve the scientific quality of integrated environmental assessment;
• to strengthen the interaction between environmental science and policy.