Towards Effective Environmental, Social, and Human Rights Impact Assessments | Geneva Rights and Environment Talks 2026

About this Event

Environmental impact assessments (EIAs) are the world’s most common, legally mandated mechanisms for environmental protection. Mandatory under customary international law, they are designed to prevent transboundary harm and are incorporated into numerous multilateral environmental agreements as well as domestic legislation in more than 180 States. 

The criteria to decide whether a project requires an impact assessment should be guided by the potential risks it poses to the environment and to human rights. Therefore, exemptions by States must be made only on the basis of best-available science and be supported by a robust analysis of proportionality, opportunity and need.  

However, EIAs face persistent criticism. These include conflicts of interest, inadequate prioritization of prevention, poor quality of assessments, “check-the-box” approaches, fragmentation of projects, arbitrary sectoral or project-level exemptions, lack of review of processes, weak rule of law, and insufficient attention to procedural rights. 

This Talk provided an opportunity to exchange experiences with impact assessment processes and to discuss how environmental, social and human rights impact assessments can be strengthened to meet States’ obligations to respect, protect and fulfil the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. The talk followed up on the UN Special Rapporteur’s report to the UN General Assembly (A/80/187) that clarifies States’ obligations regarding environmental impact assessment processes and the need to include human rights and social impacts for comprehensive and integrated assessments.  The discussion also explored how to reinforce core stages of the process, including screening, scoping, assessment review, decision-making, monitoring and compliance, so that they effectively safeguard present and future generations. 

Speakers

Astrid PUENTES RIAÑO

UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to a Healthy Environment

Sandra EPAL-RATJEN

International Advocacy Director, International Commission of Jurists

Yukti CHOUDHARY

Lawyer and Expert on Corporate Accountability, India

Caroline DOMMEN

International Lawyer, Director, Human Rights Economics and co-Leader of the Agreement on Agriculture ReImagined Initiative

Yves LADOR

Representative to the United Nations in Geneva, Earthjustice | Moderator

Highlights

Video

Summary

Yves Lador | Representative to the United Nations in Geneva, Earthjustice | Moderator

• Today, we are going to focus on quite an important issue: impact assessments. I am purposely not just saying environmental impact assessments, because we will see that this needs a larger scope; we are talking about impact assessments in a broader sense.
• We are focusing on this today because the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, Astrid Puentes, presented her report on this issue to the United Nations General Assembly last October. Of course, as it happened in New York, the fact is that what happens in New York often stays in New York, and that is precisely what we are trying to avoid. It is important to enlarge the discussion on such an issue.
• What are the recommendations? How was the report informed by the different issues that we are facing across the planet? And how was it received when you presented it in New York?

Opening

Astrid PUENTES RIAÑO | UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to a Healthy Environment

• We need to make sure that what happens in New York does not stay in New York, and that human rights conversations and the work of the mandate continue and are strengthened, and also continue to be presented in New York.
• One of the challenges that I have seen, including with environmental impact assessments, is that we still live in a very compartmentalized world. Environment, environmental legislation, and institutions are on one planet and human rights are in Geneva, and negotiations on climate or biodiversity are as if they were other planets.
• One of the main recommendations and suggestions in the report is that we move from talking only about environmental impact assessments to talking about environmental, social and human rights impact assessments.
• The idea is not to replace or restart the due diligence obligations that states and companies already have regarding human rights and the environment. Those remain. But when a new activity or project is going to be licensed, the assessment process should also include social and human rights considerations as an integral part of the evaluation.
• Another reason for this report was to integrate the advisory opinions that have recently been issued. The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) advisory opinion was published a few months before the report, and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion was published while I was editing the report. That is why you might notice that the ICJ opinion is referenced in the report; it came at exactly the right moment. I thought it was very important to include those references because these advisory opinions are key to redefining some of the critical failures and challenges that we see.
• We also carried out around six consultations across different regions. We had one here in Geneva as well. I had conversations with governments, organizations on the ground, UN entities, and also with businesses. It was very interesting to see that many of the same challenges were raised across these different groups.
• One major challenge that came up repeatedly was conflicts of interest. Many environmental authorities and officials who are genuinely committed to environmental protection described intense lobbying pressure. Some people referred to the “revolving door” problem between regulators and industry. Others said that it is no longer even a revolving door, it is simply an open door.
• Another problem is the failure to prioritize prevention and to conduct proper assessments. If we had strong impact assessments from the beginning, then better decisions could be made before projects move forward. However, in many cases, once a project applies for a license, it is almost automatically approved. That should not be the case.
• Fossil fuels are a major issue here, although not the only one. Another problem is the “check-the-box” approach, where assessments are treated as procedural formalities rather than meaningful evaluations.
• In the report, I also included several court decisions that link environmental impact assessments to human rights obligations. One example is the Norwegian case before the European Court of Justice, which recognized that conducting a proper environmental impact assessment is a human rights obligation for states.
• Fragmentation of projects is another issue that I have seen for decades. Projects are broken into smaller parts in order to avoid full assessments. We also see arbitrary exemptions being granted to certain sectors or projects. This has happened with some renewable energy projects in Europe, for example with solar or wind developments, and also with gas projects that are justified as “transitional” or “urgent”. But these exemptions can violate international law and human rights standards.
• Monitoring and compliance after a project is approved is another major weakness. Sometimes there are structures in place during the assessment stage, but once the license is granted, monitoring is weak or nonexistent.
• The weakening of the rule of law is also a serious concern. In the report, I listed several countries where environmental impact assessment frameworks have been weakened or challenged. The list is not exhaustive, but it includes Angola, Brazil, the EU, the United States, Honduras, Indonesia, Peru, the UK, Serbia and Uganda.
• Another issue that came up frequently is investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). Governments sometimes worry that if they conduct a strong environmental impact assessment and deny a project license, they could be sued under investment treaties. This concern creates additional pressure and conflict of interest in the assessment process.
• Procedural rights are also often neglected. Requirements such as free, prior, and informed consent, access to information, and meaningful public participation are sometimes treated as simple checklists. Information may technically exist but be very difficult to find, sometimes hidden on websites or inaccessible to affected communities.
• In the report, I tried to clarify the legal obligations of states regarding impact assessments, drawing on existing jurisprudence and the advisory opinions. I also proposed a framework that governments can use to conduct these assessments properly.
• The idea is to ensure that assessments are carried out before decisions are made, that they are comprehensive, and that they follow key environmental principles such as the precautionary principle, prevention, proportionality, best available science, maximum disclosure, equity and non-discrimination.
• Assessments must also be independent, ensure access to information and public participation, provide access to justice and remedies, and include special protections for marginalized communities.
• I am also proposing a practical framework, almost an “ABC”, for how to conduct environmental, social and human rights impact assessments, because many governments say that they do not know exactly how to do it.
• One of the main recommendations is that states must regulate impact assessments for all major projects, including projects related to climate action or climate solutions.
• Assessments should cover activities such as fossil fuel exploration and extraction, industrial agriculture and industrial fishing, wastewater management, mining and metallurgy, cement production and other fossil-fuel-related projects.
• Finally, I saw a strong interest from many actors in strengthening this work. One thing that I would really like to see is stronger integration of human rights perspectives in the work of institutions such as UNEP, UNDP, UNICEF, the European Union and the World Bank. These institutions already have many frameworks and standards, but they do not always speak clearly or strongly about human rights.
• That was also one of the key intentions of doing this report, to make sure that they incorporate the human rights perspective, the right to a healthy environment, and other human rights.

Sandra EPAL-RATJEN | International Commission of Jurists

• This is a very important conversation for me, and in general for human rights.
• For many of the projects I worked on I had to be confronted with environmental impact assessments as documents, as processes, and where I saw all the gaps and issues that have just been highlighted by the Special Rapporteur.
• Environmental impact assessment (EIA), which does not encompass the different processes and documents within the work on due diligence laws for businesses, and also with the ongoing negotiations for a future treaty on transnational corporations and other business enterprises, where we see a lot of movement in this field, asking for systematic human rights impact assessments and so on.
• I will focus on those kinds of impact assessments, really at the level of projects, more than on the broader ones that are also supposed to be carried out when we develop new laws, big policies, or enter into major trade agreements, so at a more meta level in a way.
• What I will highlight now, all the aspects or points I will make, are mostly captured in the written input the International Commission of Jurists sent under the call for inputs that you had in preparation for your report and that was presented at the UN General Assembly.
• EIAs have been the procedural step and aspect through which affected individuals and communities have typically been supposedly consulted and participated in decision-making processes, but also have tried to access justice, because it is one of the first interfaces that we have, as lawyers and jurists accompanying communities, to try to halt or stop a project or to try to address some of the features that will later appear in rehabilitation, reparation, or compensation schemes.
• It goes much beyond the purely technical aspect of the project itself. In human rights terms, it is very important for the right to remedy and reparation.
• EIA has traditionally played this role. I started working on some of these issues back in the 2000s, when many of these discussions were strongly influenced by large international or intergovernmental organizations that were acting in the field, in particular the international financial institutions, not least the World Bank.
• There was a massive influence of the World Bank on mining codes, and on these kinds of documents, policies and laws at the national level, particularly in African countries. The whole framework for dealing with communication with communities affected by development or investment projects was shaped through these processes.
• This changed significantly with the new mining codes, which largely left it to private actors, basically the investors, to handle these processes. They were also in charge of conducting the impact assessments.
• That shift was massive. It is interesting because it is not exactly a revolving door, but almost a movement of history, bringing us back to a stronger role for the state. If everything is left to a company and the community to manage, the state loses its decision-making and policy space. Yet that role of the state is critically needed to ensure that international human rights law obligations are respected and complied with, both procedurally and substantively.
• At the time, and I think this is still the case in many situations, EIAs were the place where so-called social aspects were addressed. That is why the Special Rapporteur’s call to rename them and include social and human rights dimensions is so important. Even if today we are also supposed to have human rights impact assessments, the EIA remains one of the main spaces where these issues are gathered and dealt with.
• In practice, this means human rights have been inserted into environmental impact assessments as “social concerns”: compensation for communities, identifying who would be affected, compensation for lost harvests, land acquisition, and similar issues.
• What we see, therefore, is that EIAs have effectively functioned as de facto human rights impact assessments. The problem, however, is that this often meant the authorities dealing with these questions were not necessarily the most adequate, legitimate, or well-equipped ones. EIAs typically go to environmental authorities or ministries of natural resources or mining, rather than to institutions with specific expertise on the so-called social aspects, which in reality are human rights issues.
• Now, with the global recognition of the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment as a universal human right, this situation needs to change. That recognition creates an opportunity that we should seize, and I think the report is a very good step in that direction.
• We also see many issues in the substance of EIAs. They are often prepared in a rushed manner and not always with the right expertise, even though the issues involved are extremely complex.
• One example concerns the El Quimbo project in Colombia. It is a hydroelectric dam project on the Río Magdalena, and it represents a textbook example of everything that can go wrong with an environmental impact assessment.
• First, it was extremely difficult for us, as lawyers for the affected communities, to access the documents. When we finally obtained them, we discovered that the assessment ran to thousands of pages. It was such a massive document that, in practice, no authority with existing capacity could realistically master it. At best, you skim through it, but it does not actually allow a meaningful understanding of the impacts.
• We also discovered that key scientific evidence was missing. No one had consulted local universities, biologists with biodiversity expertise, sociologists or anthropologists who knew the communities concerned. None of this knowledge was incorporated. In many ways, the process resembled a cut-and-paste exercise.
• Some very large consulting firms play a central role in this field. Conflict of interest and regulatory capture are major issues here, as in many other areas. In this case, it was clear that there had been no proper local consultation process. Crucial scientific evidence and indigenous knowledge were missing, which led to completely flawed conclusions about risks and biodiversity loss, among other impacts.
• At one point, hidden somewhere deep in the document, we even discovered that the name of the place had not been changed. It was essentially a reused blueprint. Villages became interchangeable, whether in the Sahel or the Amazon, this illustrates a very troubling reality. I am not saying it happens everywhere, but it is symptomatic of the quality problems we often see in the substance of EIAs.
• From a process perspective, there are also serious governance and accountability issues: corruption risks, conflicts of interest, revolving doors, and a very narrow market dominated by a handful of large consulting firms that wield enormous influence. This concentration of power is clearly not good news for human rights protection.
• In our contribution, we did not only look at this particular case. We also examined projects in special economic zones and other contexts in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and elsewhere.
• Before concluding with some examples of better practices, I want to respond to something the Special Rapporteur mentioned, which resonated strongly with me: the need to better integrate climate considerations into impact assessments.
• In the El Quimbo case, for example, we observed significant issues related to carbon emissions. Yet the project was presented as green energy, supported by carbon market credits, and these climate impacts were not meaningfully reflected in the impact assessment. Although this is not a very recent case, I do not think the situation has improved dramatically. Addressing climate impacts in EIAs remains a major area for improvement.
• Beyond the fact that EIAs often become tick-the-box exercises, administrative courts frequently have to deal with challenges to these assessments. This makes it difficult to obtain effective remedies or reach the level of scrutiny that should exist. In some cases, decisions can simply be overridden by presidential decrees, as happened here. This raises serious rule-of-law and legality issues.
• Public participation is another major issue. In many contexts, people are not genuinely consulted, and sometimes consultation is impossible because access to information is so limited.
• In terms of good practices, we highlighted several examples in our submission to the call for inputs. These include institutional frameworks designed to receive and evaluate impact assessments and decide whether projects should proceed.
• For instance, Australia has developed mechanisms to ensure sufficient independence for environmental authorities, including independence from other branches of government and guarantees such as budget autonomy.
• The Netherlands provides another example, and there are also encouraging developments in some Latin American countries aimed at strengthening procedures and creating frameworks more conducive to meaningful public participation rather than simple tick-the-box processes.
• If we want to develop tools to guide institutions and states on how to conduct these assessments, we need to reclaim some decision-making power for the public authorities. There may be useful inspiration in the work of the former Special Rapporteur on water, Léo Heller, particularly his step-by-step framework for assessing large hydroelectric projects before they proceed.

Yukti CHOUDHARY | Lawyer and Expert on Corporate Accountability

• To first give a bit of background: India is a relatively young country in terms of adopting environmental impact assessments. We formally had only a very rudimentary system earlier. India functioned more as a closed economy before liberalization. It was only after the economy opened up that we introduced a proper EIA notification in 1994.
• This notification clarified which sectors require EIAs, how the EIA process should be conducted, including scoping exercises, public consultation, and the appraisal process. All of these elements were elaborated more clearly at that stage.
• India has only about 30 years of experience with EIAs. Because of this, there are still many challenges and many things that need to be improved.
• Public consultation and appraisal are the most important parts of the environmental impact assessment process.
• Public consultation includes two components: the public hearing and the submission of written objections, if any.
• Public hearing is the stage where members of the affected community gather together in one place. Before that meeting, information about the project was published on a website, both in English and in a vernacular language. The assumption is that people will understand the technical details and the social implications of the project. However, these reports are usually prepared by consultants who present highly technical information that ordinary people often cannot fully understand. That is what is presented to communities during these hearings.
  • One key issue is that social and cultural impacts are often under-assessed. Technically, in the Indian system, social impacts are supposed to be considered through the public hearing process. But in practice, this often does not happen effectively. Ecological systems and communities usually have a very strong symbiotic relationship. Yet EIAs often overlook these connections.
  • I come from Rajasthan, which is a desert region. There is a tree called Khejri, which is highly drought-resistant and culturally sacred. When we build a house or perform religious ceremonies, the first thing we do is light a lamp near this tree. Our temples are often located close to it. The leaves, the pods, and other parts of the tree are widely used in everyday life.
  • So cultural practices are deeply connected to this ecological element. Yet EIAs rarely incorporate such traditional knowledge or cultural practices. The formal process does not adequately recognize traditional livelihoods, cultural practices, or community knowledge systems.
• A very recent example is the Jindal mega project in Odisha. I believe many of you are aware of it, because recently, eight UN Special Rapporteurs sent a letter to the Indian government expressing concerns.
• There is a fishing community in a village called Nolia Sahi. I spoke with them personally. Nearly 90 percent of the population there depends on fishing, either directly or indirectly. They even build their own boats, passing the knowledge from one generation to another.
• However, when the environmental clearance for the project was granted, this aspect was entirely overlooked. The authorities did not take into account that an entire community depends on fishing for its livelihood. Once the project begins, these people will lose their livelihoods, and they do not necessarily have the skills to transition to other types of work.
• This is a very clear example of the exclusion of social aspects from environmental impact assessments. While the system claims that public hearings address social concerns, in reality, this often does not happen.
• Another important issue concerns intersectionality in public hearings. I appreciated that the Special Rapporteur’s report mentioned women, children, and indigenous populations. But in India, the situation is even more complex. We have not only gender dynamics, but also class, caste, race, and other forms of social hierarchy. These power imbalances strongly influence participation.
• Public hearings are often held in central village locations, frequently near temples or other sacred spaces. In many cases, marginalized groups such as Dalits may not even feel comfortable entering those spaces.
• Often, these hearings are dominated by male participants and chaired by senior officials who themselves come from privileged backgrounds. Gender and caste hierarchies become very visible in these settings.
• I have personally heard of cases where women from lower castes were told to sit in a corner during the hearing and later simply asked to provide a thumbprint. In exchange, they might receive a small snack, perhaps a banana or a samosa. That becomes the supposed evidence of consent.
• What we see is not genuine free, prior, and informed consent, but rather a form of manipulated consent.
• This intersection of gender, caste and class dynamics means that often upper-caste male elites end up deciding the development trajectory of an entire region.
• Another major issue concerns regulatory changes introduced through administrative instruments, particularly office memorandums.
• An office memorandum is technically an internal administrative communication. However, it allows significant regulatory changes to be introduced without parliamentary debate or public scrutiny.
• For example, a star rating system was introduced to measure the “efficiency” of environmental appraisal agencies. If they completed the approval process within a certain number of days, they received higher ratings.
• This created a situation where agencies were essentially competing to process approvals faster, rather than conducting thorough evaluations.
• Another challenge is the lack of technical expertise in the appraisal process. Environmental files are sometimes reviewed by officials who may not have relevant expertise; they might be administrators rather than engineers, scientists, or legal experts.
• Finally, I want to mention the very important issue of ex post facto environmental clearances. Through an office memorandum, the government essentially allowed projects to begin implementation first and apply for environmental clearance later.
• This was challenged by an NGO called Vanashakti, which appealed against the practice. The case went to the Supreme Court, and initially, the Court held that ex post facto environmental clearances were against the precautionary principle, because environmental approval should come before a project begins.
• However, in November, the Supreme Court later reversed its own judgment. The Court acknowledged that large financial investments were involved and suggested that, rather than stopping such projects entirely, the situation could potentially be addressed through penalties or other corrective measures.
• So as of now, the situation in India is that ex post facto environmental clearances do exist and are allowed to some extent, which raises serious concerns because projects may already be underway before any proper environmental assessment has taken place. And this is clearly not a very good development.

Caroline DOMMEN | International Lawyer, Director, Human Rights Economics, and Co-Leader of the Agreement on Agriculture ReImagined Initiative

• The report is extremely useful and it helps move the conversation forward.
• My experience with impact assessments comes mainly from the trade policy field, so I tend to look at impact assessments of policies rather than specific projects. I have carried out four impact assessments myself, and I often review or critique others.
• Recently, together with Martin Brown, I published a how-to guide on impact assessments, which we hope will be useful primarily for trade impact assessments but perhaps more broadly as well.

Observations on the report:

• How states ignore their human rights obligations. In your report, you mentioned several legal bases for the obligation to carry out impact assessments. For me, this obligation is clearly grounded in international human rights law. It appears in a number of human rights treaties and is perhaps most clearly articulated in General Comment No. 1, and General Comment No. 3, of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
  • At a very basic level, the question is simple: how can a government propose or adopt a policy without first understanding who it will affect and how? This is a broader issue across economic policymaking. There is a real role for us to challenge the narrative that these obligations somehow do not apply in economic policy contexts.
  • There is one point in the report where I might slightly differ from your formulation, and perhaps we can discuss this. You say that states have a permanent obligation to evaluate activities and projects that may cause human rights violations or significant harm. I would actually stop the sentence earlier.
  • In my view, states have a permanent obligation to evaluate activities and projects, full stop. How can you know whether there will be human rights violations or harm if you do not first conduct an assessment?
  • Perhaps in environmental cases, the potential harm may already be visible. But in many other policy areas, such as social inequalities, it cannot be assessed until you actually sit down and analyze the potential impacts of a policy change.
  • I would say that there is a permanent legal obligation to conduct such assessments, and the legal sources for this obligation are already well established.
  • In Switzerland, there was a long debate about whether the government should conduct human rights impact assessments of trade agreements. The Swiss government initially argued that this was not necessary. Civil society kept insisting that it was. After years of discussion, Switzerland eventually moved in that direction, although implementation remains complicated.
  • One interesting episode from that process was that the Swiss government commissioned the OECD to prepare a report on impact assessments of trade agreements. In that report, the OECD treated sustainability impact assessments, environmental impact assessments, and human rights impact assessments as three completely separate categories.
  • The section on human rights was frankly astonishing. It showed a deep misunderstanding of what human rights impact assessment actually involves. The discussion became almost absurd, asking questions like whether we could quantitatively model whether a trade agreement might result in more cases of torture. That is obviously not how human rights impact assessment works. This example illustrates how human rights approaches are often misunderstood in economic policy contexts.
• Concerns the usefulness of a human rights-based approach. In my view, a human rights approach should inform any kind of impact assessment, whether it concerns environmental impacts, gender impacts, social impacts, or economic impacts. What the human rights methodology does is direct our attention to where it matters most.
  • In trade policy, this is particularly important because trade agreements now cover an enormous range of issues, including digital regulation, investment, agriculture, intellectual property, and many other areas. It is impossible to assess everything equally.
  • A human rights approach helps by starting with a key question: who are the most vulnerable groups likely to be affected?
  • Through a participatory process, you can identify two or three groups who may be particularly at risk. In some contexts, this may be women, in others it may be Indigenous peoples, or a particular region facing intersecting vulnerabilities. This approach helps direct attention to impacts that purely economic analysis often overlooks.
  • What we often see, for example, in EU sustainability impact assessments of trade agreements, is that the process begins with economic modelling. Analysts identify the sectors likely to grow most, perhaps automobile exports, for instance, and then focus on those sectors. A human rights approach reverses that logic. It does not start from the sectors with the largest economic numbers. It starts from where the risks to people are greatest.
  • This reflects core human rights principles such as non-discrimination and substantive equality.
  • This also raises an interesting question about terminology. In the trade field, we often refer to sustainability impact assessments, which include biodiversity, human rights, women’s rights, and environmental concerns. You propose using the term environmental, social, and human rights impact assessments.
  • The exact terminology is less important than ensuring that the methodology reflects a human rights perspective. But strategically, it may still be useful to think about what terminology works best across different policy fields.
  • Another important contribution of a human rights approach is that it directs attention to both market and non-market dynamics.
• In feminist economics, we often discuss how policy debates focus heavily on the market sphere while ignoring the non-market sphere, ecosystems, cultural traditions, community practices, and other forms of social organization.
• These factors are difficult to quantify, but they are essential. A human rights framework helps highlight their importance both intrinsically, because they are linked to dignity and rights, and instrumentally, because ignoring them can create long-term economic and social consequences.
• Another critique often raised about impact assessments is that analysts choose certain sectors arbitrarily. A human rights methodology helps respond to this critique. It provides an objective basis for selecting the sectors or issues to examine, because the selection is based on vulnerability and rights risks rather than political or economic preferences.
• Finally, this brings me to what I see as a double challenge. The human rights community needs to communicate more clearly what human rights approaches actually mean in practice. In macroeconomic policy discussions, there is still a great deal of misunderstanding about how human rights frameworks operate. We also need to engage more effectively with other policy communities.
• When I conduct human rights impact assessments of trade policies and speak with people working in health, Indigenous rights or women’s organizations, their first reaction is often: “I don’t know anything about trade policy, so I cannot contribute.”
• And when I speak with trade economists about human rights impact assessments, they often respond: “I don’t know anything about human rights.” So there is a real gap in mutual understanding.
• Economists are often very good at making people feel uncomfortable if they do not understand technical economic models. But we should remember that environmental and social impact assessments are ultimately about economic policy choices.
• They are about questions such as: what counts as development? What should be valued? What should be protected?
• For example, we often hear the argument that if a dam is not built, a country will never develop, even if that dam displaces communities and destroys cultural traditions. These are the dominant economic narratives.
• I believe there is a strong role for the human rights community to continue challenging these narratives and to engage more actively in these policy debates.

Yves Lador | Representative to the United Nations in Geneva, Earthjustice | Moderator

• It is interesting to see how these types of impact assessments can help us address some of the main drivers that we already identified in the previous discussion. If we do not tackle those drivers, we remain outside the real impact of the problem.
• The richness of the information shared in all these interventions shows how much we need to continue this conversation. Your report is clearly triggering something, and we will continue to build on it.
• This discussion already gives us many elements to think about regarding how we should move forward. For example, we need to better identify the different processes involved and develop a clearer model of what these processes should look like.
• There is also the legal framework. We did not have time to discuss conventions such as the Escazú Agreement, which establishes specific legal obligations for states. These instruments need to be used much more effectively.
• Another very important point raised concerns the context in which these mechanisms are applied. It is not enough to have norms. We also need to understand the real context in which they operate.
• When we talk about vulnerable people, for example, we need to be very precise about who we are referring to in each situation. I am reminded of cases in Europe involving Roma communities, where authorities believed they had addressed the issue in a sincere and constructive way, but in reality the procedures in place were not effective at all. The context in which these mechanisms operate is extremely important.
• There is clearly a lot of work ahead of us, because these instruments are already being used and they do influence decisions. Now we need to regain some control over how they are applied, because that is very much needed.

Closing

Astrid PUENTES RIAÑO | UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to a Healthy Environment

• The idea of the report is really to contribute to the conversation. We can disagree on many points and that is perfectly fine, but the goal is to try to link these discussions.
• The next report I am preparing for the General Assembly will focus on planning tools. The way I see it is that environmental impact assessments deal mainly with projects and activities. The next step is to think about planning at a broader level.
• The call for inputs is currently open until 30 March 2026.

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