LIAISE partners Klaus Rennings (ZEW) and Francesco Bosello (Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, FEEM) are organising a special session on "Linking Economic Approaches with Other Disciplines - How Environmental Economics Contributes to Sustainability Impact Assessment" at the annual conference of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists in Prague 2012.

Sustainability impact assessment has become an important issue at the European policy level. Every important regulation spanning from the field of climate change mitigation, to agricultural policy reform, to biodiversity protection has to undergo an ex ante impact assessment, including an estimation of likely economic, ecological and social impacts. This exercise clearly requires a lot of interdisciplinary research where environmental economics interacts with other disciplines and investigation approaches. Possible contributions to the session could:

• Highlight the challenges for environmental economics that are associated with the introduction of sustainable impact assessment at the European level.
• Present recent advancements of environmental economics in multidisciplinary integrated assessment effort for sustainability analysis (for example linking CGE models with models of life cycle assessment).
• Demonstrate the potential of economic investigation tools to address the sustainability issue (e.g. work done with CGE models for climate change impact assessment or with bottom-up models for climate change, biofuel, CAP policy assessment).