Environmental Council of Zambia (ECZ) is mandated to undertake Integrated Environmental Assessment & Reporting (IEA&R) in Zambia in order to provide for an assessment of the state of environment, monitor environmental trends so as to increase awareness and understanding of environmental trends and conditions, and their causes and consequences among all stakeholders. Traditional State of Environment (SoE) reports gave a good description of the state of environment at the time of writing the report. Previous SoE reports have been useful in pointing out environmental trends and conditions.

In Zambia, the process of SoE reporting has continued with two reports having been produced by ECZ in 1994 and 2000. However, SoE reporting has now evolved and demands linking environment to development as a basis for sustainable development. The new approach in SoE reporting is Integrated Environmental Assessment (IEA) defined as a process of producing and communicating policy-relevant information on key interactions between the natural environment and society.

It answers four consecutive questions that are key to effective decision making. They are:

•  What is happening to the environment?

•  Why is it happening?

•  What can we do, and what are we doing about it?

•  What will happen if we do not act now?

Integrated environmental assessment therefore, requires bringing together information and insight that usually lay scattered across a variety of disciplines and organizations.

What has been done so far:

•  Identification of themes and formation of thematic working groups; A workshop for stakeholders was held for purposes of selecting themes and forming thematic working groups. The themes for the Zambia Environment Outlook (ZEO)Report are; Land, Atmosphere, Settlement, Socio-economic, Mineral resources, Biodiversity and Water. Cross cutting issues were also identified and these include; Gender, Food Security, HIV/AIDS and Information and Awareness.

•  Training in the development of environmental indicators was conducted for stakeholders In January 2005. Currently, a tentative set of environmental indicators has been developed. This will be completed by the end of December 2007. The ZEO 2006 report is currently under production and will be completed by September 2007.

•  ECZ has gone a step further by developing environment outlook reports at district level. This is essential in assessing the state of the local environment so as to influence policy elements on which to base decision-making for district planning and development. Selected districts for the pilot exercise are Chipata, Lusaka, Solwezi and Livingstone.