The Handbook on Oil Impact Assessment was developed as a result of a scientific workshop that was held in La Coruña, Spain in September 2006. The workshop brought together scientists from across Europe to identify the main issues with regards to the integration of Impact Assessment into oiled wildlife response and the wider oil spill response. The main conclusions from the workshop were:

• Where possible, the impact of an oil spill incident on seabirds should be prevented, by using ideally pre-spill prepared information on the seasonal distribution of vulnerable species and consulting scientists in the planning of response operations.
• Impact Assessment should be an integrated part of oil spill response planning .
• There is a need for an internationally developed manual, protocol or set of guidelines that could be used to design an adequate, standardized system of data collection and analysis as an integrated part of oil spill response so that a reliable assessment of impact on wildlife populations can be made.

Online Handbook

The Handbook is published online. This ensures that always the latest version of each section is available. The different sections can be downloaded using the table of contents below. Most documents are available in PDF or Word formats.