Vivian Seto Reflects on the 2026 International Association for Impact Assessment Conference

Reflecting on IAIA26: Trust, Transparency, and the Future of Impact Assessment

By Vivian Seto, Environmental Assessment Lead, Ensero Solutions

I recently returned from the International Association for Impact Assessment's annual conference (IAIA26), and one theme kept coming up in nearly every session and conversation: How do we strengthen trust in impact assessment at a time when misinformation is widespread, complexity is growing, and perspectives are increasingly fragmented?

It is a question I think about in my own work, and hearing it framed so clearly at the conference gave me a lot to reflect on.

Trust is not a single relationship. It is an ecosystem.

What struck me most is that trust in impact assessment cannot be reduced to one relationship or one moment in a project. It has to exist between proponents, First Nations, communities, consultants, and regulators. It has to span disciplines and different knowledge systems. And it has to hold across the full lifecycle of a project, from early planning through to post-closure.

Critically, trust does not begin at the regulatory stage. It begins the moment an idea is conceived.

That means trust is hard-earned, built through consistent, transparent, and respectful engagement over months or years. It is also fragile. Processes that feel opaque, rushed, or disconnected from community values can erode it quickly, and rebuilding it takes far longer than it would have taken to protect it in the first place.

Impact assessment is not static.

IAIA26 also reinforced something I find myself coming back to regularly: this field is always evolving, and the considerations we are navigating are expanding in scope and interconnectedness.

We are now working within a context that includes geopolitical uncertainty, long-term climate resilience, accelerating biodiversity loss, Indigenous rights and the meaningful integration of traditional knowledge systems, and increasingly, the introduction of AI and other rapidly advancing digital tools into our workflows.

Discussions at the conference also highlighted some persistent structural challenges, including fragmented baseline data and the need for more structured, defensible, and transparent processes to support decision-making.

A question worth sitting with:

Across all of these conversations, an underlying question kept surfacing for me: How do we make information more accessible, more transparent, and more meaningful, within tighter timeframes, while also increasing certainty and building confidence in the process?

That is where I think the future of the practice lies.

Because better assessments are not simply about better data. They are about whether people can understand the information, engage with it meaningfully, see how decisions were made, rely on the conclusions, and ultimately, trust the process itself. Those five things, clarity, accessibility, transparency, certainty, and trust, are what give an assessment real value.

What this means for our work at Ensero:

At Ensero, multi-disciplinary integration, early and ongoing engagement with First Nations and communities, and evidence-based defensible assessments are already foundational to how we work. IAIA26 reinforced that those fundamentals remain essential.

But it also reminded me that we need to keep evolving. For our team, that means embedding trust-building from the earliest stages of project development, improving how we structure and communicate information, and thoughtfully integrating new tools (including AI) in ways that enhance rather than undermine the credibility of our work.

I am looking forward to carrying these reflections back into our projects and continuing to develop impact assessment practice that is not only technically sound, but trusted, inclusive, and meaningful to the people it is meant to serve.

Contact Vivian by email at: vseto@ensero.com