Developing a conceptual framework for delivering better cumulative impact assessment through ecosystem services review

Cumulative impact assessment is one of the most challenging and complex impact assessment practices. Ecosystems Services Review (ESR) has been suggested as a means of helping impact assessment practitioners to both identify the services impacted by proposed developments, and also the indirect and cumulative effects of ecosystem changes external to a specific project. We therefore conceptualise how ESR can be used to deliver cumulative impact assessment by combining the existing approach for integrated assessment used to identify cumulative impacts in Brazilian hydropower planning with a proposed method for ESR from the literature. We test the feasibility of this conceptual approach through a partial assessment of a Brazilian hydropower plan. We find that our conceptual approach can act to bundle the consideration of ecosystem
stressors in a way that makes analysis of cumulative impacts practicable and more meaningful to impacted communities. However, further testing in other contexts is still needed to fully evaluate the potential for an integrated IA and ESR process to efficiently assess cumulative impacts.