Task
The ICIA will prepare non-binding advice providing a judgement of the sufficiency of information provided by Impact Assessments (IA), Strategic Impact Assessments (SIA) or by environmental audits in cases where the national EIA systems are unable to achiev stakeholders concensus on the quality judgement of such assessment reports. The ICIA will not judge Impact Assessment or decision-making processes. Neither will it judge the acceptability of initiatives or suggest what the decision should look like. The ICIA will only advise on request or with the consent of governments. Its advice will cover the scoping for and the reviewing of Impact Assessment reports.
Operation
Some basic characteristics of the ICIA:
* The ICIA will be independent;
* It will have a global outreach;
* It will respect the sovereignty of governments to make decisions;
* It will be a non-profit membership organisation open to national governments, multilateral organisations, private industries and NGOs. Only members can call upon the services of the ICIA;
* It will have a small secretariat and start small, gradually building up with growing experience;
* It will have a database of experts providing any expertise (including local expertise), required to judge the impacts of development initiatives. In principal, the ICIA will have unlimited access to any expertise needed as long as the expertise is unbiased in relation to the development initiative on which it is asked to advise;
* For each individual request small specialised working groups of experts will prepare advisory reports;
* The secretariat will be responsible for the technical operation of the working groups and for the consistency in the advisory reports.
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