Symposium Theme

IAIA Virtual Symposium

Our Interconnected World: Impact Assessment, Health, and the Environment
5-8 October 2020 (with virtual interaction, discussion, and Q&A happening through 22 October)

This symposium will provide a forum to help the IA professional better understand the connections, and assess the risks, of development projects on human health and the larger environment. Many of the drivers accelerating climate change (land use change, food supply chains, and resource consumption) are also increasing human exposure to zoonotic diseases. The symposium will address several facets:

• How can the IA practitioner better measure, and see holistically, the threats to human populations and environmental quality?
• What are the new emerging technologies that can assist that endeavor? 
• Are there guidelines to how resilience can be built into systems to better sustain them during times of stress? 
• What can we learn from eras where systems were strained?

The IA profession needs to adapt in the COVID world and incorporate those significant changes into future impact assessments. This symposium will build a long-term community to extend and deepen the dialogue long past the date of the forum and provide the attendees new tools and best practices that will guide them in this new era, as experts look at four trending topics in impact assessment with the underlying theme of the interconnectedness of all topics to human health and the wellbeing of the planet as a whole:

	Health		Resilience
	Climate Change		Other key issues, including IAIA20 topics

Format

Each day of this 4-day online event will feature a live presentation (recorded for later viewing) supported by 2-4 pre-recorded presentations for a total of approximately 16 hours of material.

Check out the final program for the schedule, session descriptions, and presenter bios.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

IAIA extends sincere thanks to the following committee members for their generous in-kind contributions to this symposium:

Alan Bond │ Mike Jones │ Jiri Dusik │ Wes Fisher │ Miltos Ladikas │ Maria Partidario │ Filipe Silva │ Yina Xiao