Collective impacts: using systems thinking in project-level assessment

ABSTRACT Systems thinking is a way to better assess the collective effects of impacts arising from an individual project. Organizational silos have led to individual project-specific impacts being assessed in isolation, often ignoring the systemic interactions between impacts from the same project. This myopic approach does not properly capture the interrelated collective and systemic impacts of individual developments. This paper explores the problem, looks at addressing it through systems thinking, provides practical examples, and reflects on what this means for impact assessment.