Greenfield projects face tighter offsets scrutiny • earthtrade

Greenfield developers, including mining and resources proponents, are being urged to scrutinise draft federal environment standards.

The Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water was seeking feedback on the exposure draft of the National Environmental Standard for Matters of National Environmental Significance (MNES Standard). Consultation closed in late May.

The standard sits under reforms to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 and is intended to set clearer expectations for decisions affecting nationally protected matters.

Brisbane-based biodiversity offsets consultancy Earthtrade said developers should pay close attention to how the draft may affect project planning, offsets and approval risk.

Earthtrade director Alan Key said the proposed rules could widen the practical reach of federal environmental assessment, particularly for greenfield developments.

“Practically everything will be captured by the act,” he said. “Every greenfield development at least east of the Great Dividing Range will be captured and that wasn’t the case beforehand.

“The whole process has been quiet. It’s been a gradual introduction and now it’s a genuinely onerous exercise for developers depending on the scale and depending on the timeline.”

The department said National Environmental Standards were a key part of national environmental law reform and were intended to give businesses clearer rules and support fair, consistent decisions.

Mr Key said regulators could be heavy-handed when it came to offsets and he believed some expectations remained difficult to quantify.

“The expectations are vague and subjective in some areas,” he said. “This to the extent that the goalposts can change between assessment teams.

“The risk is always on the developer and it is very hard to hold the regulator to a position in the face of ecology and other changeable values.

“It’s almost like they have their cake, they eat it too, and it gets messy and expensive, and none of this is spelled out. There’re no definitions for quantification, particularly in those MNES factors.”

Mr Key said proponents needed to understand qualitative parts of the assessment process before committing capital.

“Each time they say ‘No’, that’s two to three months of your projects that you’re forfeiting. There’s nowhere to look for actual scientific definitions for these qualitative factors. You don’t know what that number is. They’re not going to tell you what that number is.”