INMS Guidance Document on Nitrogen Impact Assessment Methods

INMS Guidance Document on Nitrogen Impact Assessment Methods

INMS Guidance Document on Impact Assessment Methods

This INMS Guidance Document on Impact Assessment Methods provides practical guidelines for assessing beneficial and detrimental nitrogen (N) impacts on the environment and humans at all scales from local to regional to global. Written with input from scientists worldwide, this Guidance Document serves as a foundation for improved integrated nitrogen assessment and policy support.

The Guidance Document introduces concepts of reactive N impacts and provides a framework that describes transformation processes of N drivers, pressures and impacts to describe and analyze the positive and negative effects of altered reactive N cycles in different environments. We introduce a comprehensive Nitrogen Matrix of Impacts and Pressures (N-MIP), which is an interactive tool to link N impacts with brief information on underlying mechanisms and determine the category of the impacts. Six different integrated methodologies provide policy makers and other practitioners ways of examining the pathways and trade-offs involved with nitrogen fluxes. These cover: nitrogen budgets, nitrogen footprints, nitrogen use efficiency, planetary boundaries, critical loads, environmental performance index and cost-benefit assessments. The Guidance Document concludes with national or sub-national examples that illustrate how nitrogen impact methodologies have been applied.

You can find the full report here.

You can download the interactive N-MIP Matrix here.