The federal government’s recent strides to amend the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC) signal a pivotal step towards addressing biodiversity loss.
Whilst amendments are still in development, discernible patterns are emerging and one thing is certain: the reforms will require businesses to think differently about the way they use the environment.
Businesses will need to acknowledge their environmental impacts and apply genuine activities to avoid and mitigate impacts. While there is a big push to rapidly bring on renewable energies, the Commonwealth government has shown it will refuse projects if the environmental impacts are deemed unacceptable.
Thinking about potential environmental impacts at the conceptual stage of projects and applying innovative approaches to avoidance and mitigation will be paramount to any renewable energy project going through the EPBC Act assessment process.
What are some of the key changes to be aware of?
While there is a lot in this reform package, core aspects of the proposed reforms that impact the renewable energy industry include:
Streamlined assessment process and clearer guidance on what information is required should reduce assessment timeframes.
National standards, such as regional planning and restoration actions and contributions, should help industry plan and design projects with a focus on meeting outcomes rather than being bogged down in process.
Better use of landscape scale assessment methods, such as strategic assessments and regional planning, could help the renewable energy industry identify areas suitable for developments like windfarms and solar farms, saving significant time and money on referring projects in areas that are not considered suitable for development.
The Environment Protection Agency will be established to enable greater consistency around what types of projects are approved and not approved.
The Environment Information Australia will emerge to enable a greater emphasis on how biodiversity data is collected and collated, leading to greater accuracies of the presence of threatened flora and fauna species.
How will these changes affect projects?
We are going to see three core areas of change that the renewable energy industry needs to be across:
The mitigation heirarchy
While the mitigation hierarchy is not new, proponents will need to clearly demonstrate how they have avoided or mitigated an impact, rather than going straight to an environment offset.
This will require more detailed environmental options to be presented in the early design phase, which may involves considering how wind and solar farms have been better positioned or how the development footprint has been reduced – for instance, the number of wind turbines or the area under solar.
Gone are the days when ‘this is our development footprint and here is the potential offset.’
The move to net gain
Impacts to the environment that are considered significant will require an environmental offset.
Currently, under the EPBC Act the environmental offset policy uses a ‘no net loss’ principle. Impacts are calculated and the size of the offset is determined where the offset counterbalances the impact.
With the transition to a ‘net gain’ principle, the industry now needs to do more than simply counterbalance their impact. No guidance has yet been released on the quantity of this ‘more’, though the UK government has legislated 10% more.
This could mean a larger offset or requirements for other restoration activities, in addition to the counterbalance offset. The move will lead to better environmental outcomes that genuinely support the survival of impacted species through effective actions, such as feral animal control programs that go beyond standard landholder obligations and cultural burning to reduce large-scale bushfires.
Robust data
Data quality will also be a focus and need to be considered from the start of a project right through to its end. For example, when looking at the assessment of a species impact, projects will need to adopt the latest scientifically robust, peer reviewed methodology.
It is essential that the methodology is applied at the right time of year, at the right scale, and in the right manner. Projects will need to have a solid baseline (e.g., on the population of the species, habitat size) and then ensure the surveys are repeated regularly to show improvements in the impacted species population and/or habitat.
How can you prepare for these changes?
There is much you can do before these changes are enacted. At the initial stages of planning and designing renewable energy projects, investigate potential environmental impacts and consider the potential costs of these. For example, if an environmental offset is required, how much will this cost?
If there are going to be significant impacts, is there potential to move the proposed development elsewhere, or can the footprint be adjusted to minimise impacts?
If an offset is required, are you confident that you can find an appropriate offset and secure it? If finding an offset is going to be too costly or difficult to find and secure, will the project still be viable?
Businesses can focus on their environmental data plans. This entails determining exactly what data is needed (such as initial surveys to monitoring and evaluating restoration efforts), establishing methods for data storage, considering auto-population opportunities, and devising strategies for utilising the data to report on the achievement of environmental outcomes.
A well thought out data plan that will feed into the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) could save considerable time and money in the future.
While the TNFD is not part of the EPBC Act reforms, there is some expectation that industries should use this reporting framework to show their impacts and what they are doing to address the impacts.
Kylie Galway is director, environment and planning at Aurecon, with over 25 years’ experience in Commonwealth and state governments working across strategic biodiversity policy and planning, environmental offsets, environmental data and business transformation.
