Background: The science–policy interface process – known as a ‘scientific assessment’ – has risen to prominence in the past few decades. Complex assessments are appropriate for issues which are both technically complicated, multifaceted and of high societal interest. There is increasing interest from the research community that studies biological invasions to undertake such an assessment. Objectives: Providing the relevant background and context, the article describes key principles and steps for designing, planning, resourcing and executing such a process, as well as providing evidence of high-impact assessments enhancing scientific careers. Method: Experience from international and national assessments, most recently the South African scientific assessment for the Shale Gas Development in the Central Karoo, was used to develop this guiding generic template for practitioners. Analyses of researcher publication performances were undertaken to determine the benefit of being involved in assessments. Results: The key success factors for assessments mostly relate to adherence to ‘process’ and ‘governance’ aspects, for which scientists are sometimes ill-equipped. As regards publication outputs, authors involved in assessment processes demonstrated higher H-indices than their environmental scientist peers. We have suggested causal explanations for this. Conclusion: Effectively designed and managed assessments provide the platform for the ‘co-production of knowledge’ – an iterative and collaborative process involving scientists, stakeholders and policymakers. This increases scientific impact in the society–policy domain. While scientists seem concerned that effort directed towards assessments comes at the detriment of scientific credibility and productivity, we have presented data that suggest the opposite.

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The scientific assessment of shale gas development was compiled by over 200 authors and peer reviewers from around the world. Novel methods of assessment were used, based on the concepts of scenarios, risk and predictive landscape modelling. Three development scenarios were assessed against a baseline scenario, across 17 topic-specific chapters. Risk profiles for spatially explicit impacts in distinctive receiving environments were generated and investigated with and without mitigation. Risk was determined by simultaneously considering the consequence of an impact and its likelihood of occurrence, with topicconsequence terms calibrated to ensure a degree of consistency across all topics. A landscape risk model was populated to generate a composite spatial overlay representing the cumulative evolution of the risk profile across the scenarios, representing the full lifecycle of shale gas development activities from initial exploration to final closure and site remediation. For the production-scale scenarios, risk ranges from very high and high before mitigation; to generally moderate after mitigation, assuming that best-practice mitigation is applied and that adequate governance and institutional capacity exists to enforce it. Given the expanse of the study area (171 811 km 2) and the relatively small physical surface footprint of shale gas development activities, mitigation best practice is led through application of the mitigation hierarchy, prescribing avoidance of impacts first, largely by adjusting the exact location of wellpads, roads and other structures to not coincide with sensitive surface and geophysical features. Through effective project planning, the majority of sensitive environments in the Central Karoo can be avoided, thus maintaining the social and ecological character and integrity of the region which is so important to many stakeholders. From a cumulative risk perspective, modelling results suggest that shale gas development activities, at the scale expected in the large-scale gas production scenario, may be near to exceeding the development threshold of the Central Karoo given the current paucity of water, skills and infrastructure in the region.

In the last decade, seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) has come to be seen by policy-makers as a novel technology that will significantly advance water security in South African coastal regions. Water purveyors, from the private sector, local/district municipalities and provincial authorities, are undertaking studies to explore the feasibility of SWRO to meet growing demand and relieve mounting pressure on current bulk water supply infrastructure. With this in mind, it is suggested that national strategic planning should be introduced to present the opportunities and constraints of the desalination option within the national water and energy policy. In absence of this, piece-meal decisions will be made at local authority levels and the construction of SWRO plants will be determined by regional circumstances (e.g. drought) as opposed to national water policy agenda. This paper explores the value of such a strategy by considering the drivers of SWRO in South Africa, the risk of unplanned large-scale SWRO implementation (with a focus on environmental impacts) and the initial steps that could be taken toward a Strategic Environmental Assessment for SWRO in South Africa.