"An environmental impact assessment system for agricultural R&D" has been implemented by the Brazilian Agricultural Research Agency (Embrapa) aiming at fulfilling the institutional mission statement of 'introducing sustainable development objectives in all steps of agricultural research'. The impact assessment platform emphasizes close interaction between R&D teams and technology-adopting producers, under actual field contexts, in order to improve both the technology development and the demand probing processes. The proposed integrated environmental indicators system (Ambitec-Agro) has been routinely applied in technology appraisals by all of Embrapa's Research Units, as one of the criteria of its institutional evaluation system, and toward the formulation of the Social Balance Reports, annually published since 1997. The present paper describes the social and environmental dimensions of this integrated impact assessment platform, its roles in the institutional learning process for technology research management, and an impact analysis of proposed agricultural innovations.