A flexible approach to environmental impact assessments
15 March 2017
WSP | PB: Resilience is a term
environmental
professionals have been using for a long time, and today it has become
part of the language of business. It refers to an ecosystem’s capacity
to recover from disturbance or withstand ongoing pressure. WSP | Parsons
Brinckerhoff’s Technical Executive for Environmental Impact Assessment
Amanda O’Kane explores the process of building resilience into the
environmental impact assessment process for large, complex projects.
For proponents of large, complex infrastructure projects, the concept of
resilience takes on particular significance when it comes to
environmental impact. Today, the complexity of the environmental impact
assessment (EIA) process calls for significant time and effort to
identify, address and mitigate issues. Meanwhile owners and clients,
faced with the reality of accelerating market change and pressure on
capital spending, are looking for the most efficient path to market.
As leading environment and engineering consultants, one of our
overriding objectives is to fast-track the time to market by solving key
project EIA challenges early. We aim to do this while also ensuring a
robust technical assessment that will provide confidence to the
regulator and assessors and, importantly, a level of confidence for the
community.
The framework of an EIA remains constant for any complex infrastructure
development. Issues revolve around the project’s potential impacts on
the environment and the provision of workable mitigation and management
tools. Meanwhile, while the scale of the assessment may change, the
legislation pathway to conditions may also remain the same.
The objective of any focussed EIA process is to avoid the pitfall of
becoming side-tracked by evolving EIA trends, which may demand more
onerous assessment and that may not be relevant to the specific impact
assessment.
Before the project is introduced to the public, the planning phase must
focus on defining the environmental values to engage and influence
engineering decisions.
As environment consultants to proponents of large complex infrastructure
projects, our role is to ensure:
Environment is incorporated early in the engineering design process, to
promote early measures for avoiding adverse impacts to be identified and
to provide stakeholders with informed project outcomes.
Consistency in key personnel, communication and project description is
maintained across the life of the project.
The first impression of a project to the public is given confidently,
with robust methodology already in place and key constraints identified,
and with an initial understanding of residual impact – this all requires
significant ‘behind the scenes’planning to inform the early risk
evaluation.
We respect the end product but remain flexible enough to know the path
to get there will change – the aim is to pre-empt this change and plan
for it before the project goes public.
We engage appropriate experts for early data commitment or to identify
the constraints that influence the scale of the impact assessment and
data collation sustainability in business and response time to
facilitate planning for change – as a large organisation we have the
ability to provide teams and individuals that can quickly respond to
change.
We understand the environmental culture of current and opposition
governments that may dictate future EIA trends, such as social impact
and groundwater assessments.
A project spanning greater than 12 months of environmental approvals
will certainly be influenced by market changes and government trends. To
build resilience in the EIA process, the project focus should always be
on what can be controlled, while planning for change.
For complex approvals in a business environment that require a short
delivery time to market, it is vital to reduce the EIA complexity by
early control of constraints and to ensure consistent and informed
stakeholder messaging.
It is also important to allocate the project deliverables into smaller
components, focussing on what can be controlled for the life of the
project, and identifying what will be influenced by market changes and
social influences. This promotes timely responses to the challenges
arising across the life of the EIA, rather than these challenges
prolonging project timeframes and costs.
Like a resilient ecosystem, a resilient EIA process is one that recovers
quickly from disturbances, such as market changes, and withstands
ongoing pressure because it has been well planned from the start.
--ENDS--
Source: WSP | Parsons Brinckerhoff - www.wsp-pb.com
Contact: Amanda O'Kane | Technical Executive for Enviromental Impact Assessment | 07 3854 6226
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