Lecture: The paper will discuss the practice of Health Impact Assessment (HIA) as a potential contribution to environmental policy making. Closer cooperation between environmental and public health disciplines could support more effective and politically acceptable solutions to both local and global environmental problems. Impact assessment (IA) practices sit at the junction of science, policy, and politics. The recent emergence of HIA as an independent form of IA has created both a setting for inter-disciplinary health and environmental coordination as well as a driver for greater consideration of health in existing forms of IA. Nevertheless, the integration of HIA into policy making involves a variety of barriers and challenges. We will discuss the various existing legal schemes for such integration and its potential contribution to the democratization of risk governance.