The report on ―Screening impacts of EU policies on rural areas‖ (PRIMA Deliverable 6.1.) discusses the title topic in the context of the different contex-tual and methodological aspects taken into account in PRIMA with special emphasis on the screening of policies impacts. The report starts with the definition of the terms of screening and impact assessment for EU applica-tions. Several screening approaches are differentiated and the screening re-quirements are named for the screening of impacts, programmes and projects in the context of Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and new approaches of Sustainability Impact As-sessment (SIA). The screening is mainly discussed from the perspective of (a) the policies assessment by the example of SEA, (b) the general screening requirements, (c) the ongoing developments of Sustainability Impact Assessment Tools (SIAT), (d) in the context of multifunctionality of rural areas, (e) in the mod-elling context of the Agent Based Modelling, (f) the stakeholder and local knowledge perspective, and (g) in the indicator application context of the rural development indicators applied in PRIMA. The report is organised in the way that in the first part experiences of Impact Assessment of policies are given followed in the second part by main aspects in the research focus of PRIMA. Screening should be enhanced in PRIMA for the usage in Ex-ante Impact Assessment to analyse potential effects of new policies before their adoption. SIA will be enhanced by using experiences developed for SEA and EIA. The policies assessment of the Strategic Environmental Assessment concludes the experiences made for the environmental dimension of sustainability and the main steps of a screening process are explained. The discussion about SIAT gives an overview about existing and future SIAT approaches, i.e. Tools dedi-cated to ex-ante Sustainability Impact Assessment, and recapitulates the expected links between the scope of PRIMA and this emerging field of applied research. A synthesis of main methodological research questions and steps of screening application is summarized. PRIMA will enhance the screening process by methods and model develop-ments (Agent based modelling and micro-simulation), stakeholder involve-ment techniques and the linkage of this approaches to impact indicators in the context of multifunctionality of rural areas. The stages of an EIA process is explained for the adoption to ABM model developments and clarified by the importance and relevancy of information for screening and scoping when implementing of ABM. Stakeholders and local knowledge should be linked carefully to the policy assessment when providing essential information for the model application and for the test of essential indicators and for the for-mulation of projects, plans and programmes wanted/needed by the stake-holders. Methodological issues for the production of local knowledge are named for the identification of stakeholders and the techniques application. Finally a list of indicators for the usage in PRIMA and developed on the basis of the indicators of the Rural Development Report is given. These indicators will link the Impact Assessment to the monitoring of rural development.