With six years remaining until the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games, this viewpoint examines whether conventional impact assessment approaches are adequate for governing the cumulative, cross-scalar, and long-term impacts of mega-events. The Olympic and Paralympic Games generate governance and assessment challenges that extend beyond the scope of traditional project-based environmental impact assessment (EIA), including multiple interdependent developments, compressed delivery timeframes, event-phase operational pressures, regional infrastructure transformations, long-term legacy commitments, and uneven social and environmental impacts. Drawing on international Olympic experiences and impact assessment scholarship, this viewpoint identifies critical limitations of project-level EIA in addressing cumulative, indirect, induced, and legacy effects across spatial and temporal scales. In response, it proposes a tiered impact assessment framework tailored to the Brisbane 2032 context and informed by Australia's regulatory environment. The framework integrates four mutually reinforcing tiers: (a) strategic regional assessment, (b) program- and precinct-scale assessment, (c) project-level EIA and environmental impact statement processes, and (d) adaptive follow-up, monitoring, and legacy stewardship. The viewpoint argues that a tiered and integrated approach can strengthen accountability, improve cumulative impact governance, enhance inter-agency coordination, and support more sustainable, equitable, and enduring legacy outcomes for mega-event host cities.
Baresi et al. (Thu,) studied this question.