Environmental reporting requirements will be stopped or halved for more than 60 per cent of low to medium-risk industry licences under a new pilot project.
The Reduced Reporting Burden project is a Streamline WA initiative, which aims to reduce the workload for licence holders for routine or lower-risk matters and provide the regulator with more time to focus on higher-risk matters.
Previously, annual environmental monitoring and reporting are required for these licences, regardless of the operation’s risk to the environment or public health, or whether the information is likely to change from year to year.
Under the pilot program, a risk-based assessment was conducted to identify licences eligible for reduced reporting requirements. These include:
- licences with no monitoring requirements will no longer require annual environmental reports; and
- licences with limited monitoring requirements will move to environmental reports every two years.
Other licences, such as those that require comprehensive monitoring and have several environmental issues, multiple monitoring points, complex monitoring suites and/or high frequency monitoring, will continue to require annual environmental reporting.
More information can be found at https://www.wa.gov.au/service/environment/environment-information-services/reduced-reporting-burden-pilot-project
As stated by Environment Minister Reece Whitby:
“This project applies a risk-based approach when setting reporting conditions which encourages good environmental performance, while also providing regulators with more time to focus on higher-risk matters.
“It is important to note that the environmental monitoring requirements stay the same.
“While the changes relate to existing licences, these principles have been applied to the assessment of applications for new licences over the past 18 months, with more than 80 licences already benefitting from a reduction in unnecessary reporting requirements.
“We are now looking at where this practice can be applied to other instruments – to reduce unnecessary workload for licence holders and regulators for low-risk matters.”
