This issue of Impact Connector focuses on the use of economic methods and instruments to inform decision making and policy settings within the impact assessment context, to support sustainable development. Among the various economic methods so far developed, economic valuation of the environment, or environmental valuation, has been increasingly used to inform and justify decision-making about resource development. This is a response to traditional cost benefit analyses lacking information about certain values, especially those related to intangible ecosystem services. This leads to such services being perversely treated as having “no value” or at least being given less weight relative to tangible values, such as marketed goods when trade-offs between these values are considered (TEEB, 2010). Economic impact assessment (EcIA) is another method that has emerged, to be used as part of, or in parallel to, conventional impact assessment (IA) in a decision-making process. At a project level, EcIA quantifies, among other things, the socio-economic impacts of proposals such as value added or the contribution to GDP and employment. At a policy level, EcIA can be used in parallel with other IAs to provide quantified costs/benefits of the policy – for example, as part of a ‘section 32’ report under the RMA in New Zealand.