An environmental impact is a change in environmental conditions attributable to an activity or intervention. The change can concern biodiversity, water quality, carbon storage or another specified property of an ecosystem. Its sign and magnitude depend on the chosen outcome, spatial boundary and observation interval.
Causal interpretation requires a comparison: a change observed after an intervention might also reflect climate variation. A long-term grassland experiment directly varied species richness and followed annual aboveground biomass production. Higher species richness increased the temporal stability of total production, even though individual species could fluctuate more strongly.[ref] The example shows why measuring an environmental impact requires identifying both the affected property and a credible comparison, rather than treating every environmental measurement as evidence of a particular cause.

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