The Environmental Evidence Library contains a collection of Systematic Reviews (SRs) of evidence on the effectiveness human interventions in environmental management and the environmental impacts of humans activities.

These reviews are rigorous, objective evaluations of the positive and negative effects of our actions. Each review contains a summary of main findings for the benefit of the user community (policy, management etc) and may be accompanied by supplementary lists of articles, explanatory notes and policy briefs.

Environmental Evidence journal is the open-access scientific publication of the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence, launched in September 2011 with BioMEd Central (publisher). Please visit the journal’s website or read the Instructions for Authors for more details.

The Library’s procedures are similar (but more transparent, interactive and supportive) to those of a peer-reviewed journal and it has an Editorial Board. All documents submitted to the website undergo a peer review process: please see our peer review policy and document handling procedures for more information. On submission of a draft protocol a dedicated webpage is created for the review and the review team is encouraged to use this page to advertise the review process, post supplementary information and engage with stakeholder groups.

The review process

All SRs go through a number of stages and periods of consultation, both at draft protocol and draft review stage, whereby feedback on draft documents is solicited from stakeholders, academic experts and the user community. The diagram to the left illustrates this process.

Subject Scope

We consider all systematic reviews of relevance to the environment, environmental change, environmental management, impacts of human activity and relationships between the environment and human wellbeing. The focus may be on physical, chemical or biological aspects of the environment and all types of environment from natural to urban are included. Systematic reviews usually address questions on effectiveness of interventions or impacts of exposure, but other foci such as prevalence of an agent or test accuracy are also acceptable.