Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
IS
• Experienced clients don't need to be told. But many clients are still naïve and
believe that the environmental approvals should be relatively trivial. They have
all the fi nancial and other aspects weighing on them pretty heavily, but things
like the EPBC Act (Australian Commonwealth
Environmental Protection
Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999
) are quite a signifi cant and have the potential
to stop the project in its tracks.
• It is important to engage very early with regulators. Because the processes are
long-term and you fi nd things out as you go, that the rules may change and that
you should be prepared to fi nd things you might not have expected.
• There is also a tension between simply abiding by the rules to achieve the
approval and to undertake good science to get a good environmental outcome.
Q: TP to IS - It is a highly qualitative and subjective task conducting ecological
observations - can I ask you IS to make some observations about if this is a rea-
sonable hypothesis and do you discuss this with proponents early?
IS
•
Yes. A lot of them are engineers and they understand process, but not uncertainty.
Unfortunately ecology is all about uncertainty. Through all the processes people
have gone through we have heard about this morning e.g. The Bluff Point and
Studland Bay Wind Farms and Orange-bellied Parrot - OBP, was not found to be
such a massive issue as the process progressed. We've heard a lot about quantita-
tive assessment, but variance is often just a factor that people don't understand
when they come to the process and need to be made aware of.
Q: TP to IS - One further follow up question for IS around issues of uncertainty.
Is there a difference/what is the difference between those types of challenges
for ecological assessment for a wind farm verses the types of assessments for
other projects?
IS
•
Not for the basic process, which is to determine what the signifi cant impacts are
and how they can be avoided. What we've been experiencing in the wind indus-
try is that there seems to be a particular interest in having very specifi c and pre-
cise measurement of those impacts, which is probably quite different to what we
experience for other types of projects.
Q: TP to SP - Can you give your thoughts of what is the role of our academic insti-
tutions to enhance our academic observations of these issues and are Universities
being as effective as they could and should be on those issues?
SP
•
Hugely under-utilized. The academic industry sits in a very different niche to the
consulting industry. We are there to provide the information that everybody else
builds on.
