Health Impact Assessment (HIA) Guidebook and Toolkit

To support healthy transportation and community planning in the Lower Mainland and the rest of BC, Metro Vancouver, Vancouver Coastal and Fraser Health Authorities, TransLink, and several other organizations worked together to develop a guidebook and corresponding toolkit for health impact assessments. EcoPlan led the development of the Guidebook, and conducted a survey of nearly 300 planning, transportation, and public health professionals. Information was gathered about knowledge of Health Impact Assessment (HIA) and barriers to its use in the Lower Mainland to better understand how a guidebook could be of greatest use to healthy built-environment interested and affected parties.

Organized around the standard and well-tested HIA method, the Guidebook provides an introduction to HIA and illustrates how it can be used to support and improve land use and transportation planning processes. The Guidebook provides significant context, answering key questions such as who leads, how much it costs, and how to integrate HIA with existing planning and development activity.

Winner of a Planning Institute of BC 2016 Award for Planning Excellence in Research & New Directions in Planning, the guidebook has been used to support HIAs for both the removal of Georgia Viaducts in Vancouver, and the replacement of the George Massey Tunnel replacement project in Delta, BC since its publication in 2016.