Dr William R. Sheate is a Reader in Environmental Assessment at Imperial College London.  Bill is a leading expert in Environmental Impact Assessment and has a distinguished record with the European Commission.

Originally an ecologist, Bill has worked, lectured and published widely on environmental assessment and policy for some 27 years. He has worked as a practicing ecologist, in consultancy, academia and in the voluntary sector.  Most of his professional career has been spent working in interdisciplinarity. He splits his time evenly between academia (Imperial College London, where he is Reader in Environmental Assessment) and consultancy (Collingwood Environmental Planning, where he is Technical Director).  His experience lies in the development and application of environmental policy and legislation (especially EIA/SEA/SA in the European Union), assessment procedures, methodologies, and public and NGO participation.  He holds a PhD (on the basis of published work) on Accountability in Environmental Assessment Law, Policy and Practice in the EU.  He has been an expert advisor to the EU, the European Environment Agency, the UK, Irish, Uruguay and Nicaraguan governments, the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) and the National Trust; was a board member of Transport 2000 and a long-standing member of the Environment Agency (and formerly National Rivers Authority) Thames Regional Committees; and has been involved in various committees of the International Association for Impact Assessment (IAIA). 

He has managed major studies for the European Commission DG Environment on SEA and Integration of the Environment into Strategic Decision-Making (2000/01); on the relationship between the EIA and SEA Directives (2004/5); and led an international team in the development and application of sustainability assessment of biodiversity management scenarios for declining agricultural areas in upland Europe (EU 5FP, 2002-5).  Recent activities include: EA practice and research in England, Scotland ,Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland; research for the European Environment Agency on scenarios, futures studies, megatrends and planetary boundaries; research for Defra on ecosystem services in the Thames Gateway, and evaluations of biodiversity offsetting and Nature Improvement Areas; and sustainability assessments for the Greater London Authority on the GLA's Water Strategy and Climate Change Adaptation Strategy.  He was a co-author on the Urban chapter of the UK's National Ecosystem Assessment and of Chapter 9 of the NEA follow-on project on environmental appraisals.

Bill has published extensively in the assessment field, and is the author of Making an Impact: A Guide to EIA Law and Policy (1994, 2nd edition1996) published by Cameron May, London.  He was the Founding Editor of the international Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management (ICP/WSPC) (from 1998-2009), now firmly established as one of the leading journals in the environmental assessment field.  He is the editor of Tools, Techniques and Approaches for Sustainability - published by World Scientific (October 2009).  Bill continues as a member of the JEAPM editorial board and is also Chair of the Environment Sub-committee, and member of the Editorial Advisory Board, Imperial College Press/World Scientific (UK).   He is also an Honorary Professorial Research Fellow in the School of Environment, Education and Development at the University of Manchester.  He was appointed in 2014 Specialist Adviser to the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee inquiry into HS2 and the Environment.  He is recognised as an international expert in advising on environmental assessment and compliance matters, e.g. for judicial review, and in April 2015 he testified on behalf of the Government of Nicaragua at the International Court of Justice in Nicaragua v Costa Rica (Border Road).

Publications