Ivar Lyhne

Aalborg University · Department of Development and Planning

The opportunities and potential of advanced digitalisation involving the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Environmental Assessment (EA) are often mentioned across international studies. However, it is essential for us in EA research and practice to comprehensively grasp the implications of this transformation and proactively prepare f...

This article develops guidelines for embedding Systems Thinking principles into tools for sustainability assessment for use in the early stages of sustainable business model (SBM) innovation. Describing the sustainability of business model innovations often takes place without robust assessments and without consideration for the wider system within...

As a collective approach for achieving economic, environmental, and social effects, industrial symbiosis is considered an important tool to realize a circular economy. In both literature and practice, the need for a third party facilitating the development of these resource exchanges between companies has been highlighted. This paper explores the a...

The sustainability challenges tackled in environmental assessments (EA) call for transdisciplinary cooperation linking research and practice in a joint change agency. This article explores the researcher's agency through the development of an EA network that seeks to support collaboration between researchers and practitioners, mutual learning, and...

Industrial symbiosis, as a collective approach for using excess resources, is considered a means to realizing a circular economy. Industrial symbiosis can be seen as a way of improving the environmental sustainability of individual companies’ business models, as well as a way of creating collaborative business models that are widely considered an a...

Industrial symbiosis, as a collective approach for using excess resources, is considered a means to realizing a circular economy. Industrial symbiosis can be seen as a way of improving the environmental sustainability of individual companies’ business models, as well as a way of creating collaborative business models that are widely considered an a...

Adverse impacts from wind turbine obstruction lights have received little attention in literature and practice with respect to community annoyance with wind energy and studies on the effects of mitigation measures are absent. Technology development has made demand-based obstruction lights possible, allowing lights to be turned on only when aircraft...

Larger wind turbines are developed to harvest greater amounts of wind energy. This development increases the dilemma between ensuring aviation safety through obstruction lights and reducing citizen annoyance and possible stress effects caused by obstruction lights. In this study, a unique Danish sample is contrasted with a combined German-Swiss sam...

Debates concerning the relation between Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and environmental assessment (EA) have long suggested their integration in some form. The purpose of this paper is to go beyond conceptual debates to explore practices of environmental impact assessment and strategic environmental assessment in terms of how they change in...

Environmental assessments (EAs) are in research and policy expected to be a vehicle for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It has been argued that the scoping of EA, both on project and strategic levels, can be broadened to encompass the 17 goals and thereby strengthen the commitment towards sustainable development. However, stu...

Impact assessment (IA) tools are targeted at decisions and decision-making in theory and in practice. Often described as decision support instruments, most IA are driven by the grand purpose of providing for informed decision-making. In practice this often means IA tends to be more concerned with the information to be provided than with the outcome...

Linking UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Environmental Assessment (EA)—for mutual benefit—is an emerging topic within research and practice. Thus, knowledge and models of how to make the link are rather undiscovered and novel. This article aims to contribute to the understanding of linkages between the SDGs and EA in theory and practice....

Purpose‘Green’ business models1 have received considerable political and financial support, which for the public is a validation of the sustainability of the business models. The sustainability performance seems, however, often questionable, and the purpose of this paper is to investigate the performance of a specific public support programme for g...

Working with more than 25 companies, we jointly developed 42 green business models for industrial symbiosis, which together will lead to significant decrease in greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption, and material use.

This brochure focuses on the development and environmental assessment of sustainable business models for Industrial Symbiosis. An industrial symbiosis business model describes how a business creates value by exchanging surplus resources such as residual products and energy with one or more other companies. The GAIA model is a tool for working with...

From simple organizations as gateways for goods and passengers, ports have evolved and transformed into complex organizational systems with multiple functions. Besides providing cargo, logistics, and other kinds of services to its customers, modern ports engage in the development of their hinterlands. Sustainability, evolving from environmental act...

Although public participation has become an integrated part of planning practice, experience and documents literature still document difficulties in implementing participatory planning processes that provide arenas where citizens can truly influence planning. Based on a combination of institutional theory and action research methodology, this paper...

Social media plays an increasingly prominent role in the interaction between impact assessments and society. Impact assessment is thus becoming part of social networks that are claimed to be able to improve interaction between actors in impact assessment processes. By investigating the use of social media in impact assessment and planning processes...

Citizens’ self-mobilization has received considerable attention in literature on land use policy and environmental politics. Involved in this mobilization process is a group of highly engaged citizens, which are known by a variety of names in literature and acknowledged for their role in policymaking. To better understand this group of policy actor...

The relation between wind power development and local communities has received considerable attention in literature and practice. Relatively few studies, however, have provided evidence about how local citizens perceive enduring environmental impacts such as aviation obstruction lights installed on wind turbines or on wind farm light masts. Evidenc...

This article adds to the growing insight into public acceptance by presenting a novel approach to how citizens make sense of new energy infrastructure. We claim that to understand public acceptance, we need to go beyond the current thinking of citizens framed as passive respondents to proposed projects, and instead view infrastructure projects as e...

Conditions that enable successful public participation have received increased attention in research and practice. This paper contributes with an empirical study of the conditions that determine the substantive influence of public participation processes. We explore a list of conditions in a Danish context through a survey of practitioners’ percept...

Social impact assessment (SIA) is applied worldwide to assess social impacts of plans and projects. In Europe, directives on environmental assessment (EA) require attention to social impacts, however, there is a need to investigate the implementation in practise. To this end, we study three Danish cases, which are characterised by debates and confl...

Considerable attention has been given to the effectiveness of environmental impact assessment (EIA) since the 1970s. Relatively few research studies, however, have approached EIA as an instrument of environmental governance, and have explored the mechanisms through which EIA influences the behaviour of actors involved in planning processes. Consequ...

The spectre of regulatory reform carried out in a range of Western countries has generated concern amongst parts of the environmental policy community. Quality and effectiveness are said to be at stake, but empirically there is a dearth of data on the relationship between provisions for quality control and the effects on quality and effectiveness....

Political power has received curiously limited attention within the vast literature on environmental governance. This article addresses this research lacuna by employing a particular perspective on power – governmentality – to examine the environment as a site for the contestation of power and authority. Our empirical focus is the ‘making up’ (afte...

Inspired by action research traditions, this article argues for a need to strengthen the role of interviews as an arena for generating action through mutual reflection. The aim is to point out and conceptualize the unarticulated action-oriented elements that appear in action researchers’ interview practice. The article traces the development of the...

Determination of significance is widely recognised as an important step in environmental assessment (EA) processes. The prescriptive literature and guidance on significance determination is comprehensive within the field of EA, whereas descriptive and explorative studies of how we go about making sense, or construct meaning, of actions to determine...

Despite their important role in shaping the technologies of the future, public research and development (R&D) programmes are rarely based on systematic assessments of the environmental effects. R&D programmes thus allocate a huge amount of financial resources to projects, which potentially may cause severe negative environmental impacts. This paper...

Unpredictable and complex developments challenge the application of strategic environmental assessment (SEA), for example, in terms of timing, prediction and relevance of assessments. In particular, multi-actor and unstructured strategic-level decision-making processes often seem to be characterised by unpredictable and complex changes. Despite the...

This paper has point of departure in a planning process on energy infrastructure in Denmark and focuses on a particular public hearing meeting characterised by trenchant opposition and distrust to the authorities among the public. It points at the need to understand the interaction between authorities and the public in such planning often character...

This article deals with the challenge of approaching decision-making processes through strategic environmental assessment (SEA). It is argued that the interaction between policy-making and planning in strategic decision-making processes is a neglected reason for problems with applying SEA, as legislation and guidance on SEA primarily approach eithe...

This paper presents the challenges of applying strategic environmental assessments (SEA) on transboundary energy infrastructure planning in Denmark. The challenges are actualised by the need to develop the energy infrastructure due to political priority on the issues of climate change, renewable energy, and depletion of domestic fossil fuel resourc...