"MIA - Metabolic Impact Assessment: from concept to practice" brings together two separate research fields, Urban Metabolism (UM) and Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA). The main objective is to advance CITTA previous work on the concept of Metabolic Impact Assessment (MIA) (for more information, see  SUME  project) to make it operational and readily applicable as an innovative and far-reaching planning policy instrument.

Departing from the research carried out on modeling of UM, the main objective of MIA is to estimate the impact of new planning proposals, such as urban plans and major urban development projects, on the existing metabolic performance of cities. As such, MIA is a decision making tool for development control purposes, taking advantage of the comprehensive and holistic view of cities provided by UM models, and representing, in this way, a step forward in relation to tradicional SEA.

However, the first application of MIA in SUME project, albeit producing very interesting and promising results, have also revealed two major barriers: one related with the methodological complexity and data demanding nature of MIA and, the other, related with the need to provide MIA with a solid procedural framework, incorporating the MIA concept into existing SEA procedures, otherwise this promising idea would never get full recognition and wider dissemination.

To address these barriers, making the MIA concept truly operational, two main research challenges will be explored in this research project, one following an institutional/procedural perspective and, the other, following a methodological/technical perspective. These perspectives are conceived as two parallel and complementary research avenues that will come together in the final phase of the project.

On the institutional/procedural side, an in-depth analysis of the EU Directive on SEA and of the corresponding Portuguese legislation will be carried out. All SEA processes (7 to date) of urban plans and major urban projects in the cities of Lisbon and Porto will be analysed. These processes are stored in the regional SEA authorities (the CCDRN and the CCDRLVT, both partners in this project).

A simulation will be carried out of an application of MIA to these 7 cases. This simulation exercise is likely to reveal a number of procedural difficulties and the need to introduce adjustments in the initial (and fairly general) MIA's framework. The idea is to arrive to a kind of 'plug-in' solution to articulate MIA with the existing SEA procedures without significantly changing these, which would certainly constitute an additional political and administrative obstacle to the wider acceptance of this innovative concept.

In parallel, on the methodological/technical side, our research will focus on how approaches to UM modelling can be simplified and made less data demanding and user friendly within the context and for the specific purposes of MIA applications to urban projects. Taking advantage of previous research work on the cities of Lisbon and Porto a review will be made of all the data that has been feeding the UM modelling of these two cities. The main four components of UM models will be considered, namely energy (buildings and transports), water, materials and land (land use). 

This attempt to reduce the amount of data and complexity of the technical approaches to build the different modeling components will be applied to the 7 case studies. This technical simplification process should not jeopardize the more comprehensive and intelligible results provided by MIA as compared to the more traditional impact assessment techniques currently used in SEA.