摘要：Ex ante impact assessment can help in structuring the analysis of human-environmentinteractions thereby supporting land use decision making for sustainable development. The contributionsto this special feature focus on some of the challenges of making land use impact assessment operationalfor policy making. A total of nine papers deal with the needs and uses of assessment tools for policy makingat the European level, with the value-based influence in scenario development, and with ex ante impactassessment studies in different contexts, spatial systems, and for different purposes and user groups. Theconcept of landscape multifunctionality was implicitly or explicitly employed as an integrating entitybetween socioeconomic and biogeophysical features of a spatial system. Three major aspects were revealedthat could improve the relevance of the policy of land use impact assessment: the involvement of decisionmakers early on in the design of the impact assessment study; the integration of quantitative analysis withparticipatory valuation methods; and the robust and transparent design of the analytical methods
关键词：impact assessment; landscape; land use; multifunctionality; science-policy interface
