SUSTAINABILITY: A NEW ERA IN APPROVALS PROCESSES

Abstract

With its in-principle approval of the Gorgon gas proposal, the Western Australian government has heralded a new era —the era of sustainability assessments.

No longer confined to strict environmental criteria, sustainability assessments will also consider the economic and social aspects of proposed oil and gas developments. This has a number of ramifications for the legal framework within which existing approvals processes operate.

This paper examines traditional environmental assessment as represented by the processes used by Western Australia and the Commonwealth (which will be applied to the Gorgon proposal). It finds that while economic and social factors are expressly included in the legal framework, these factors have not played a large role in either assessing the significance of proposal impacts or in determining the conditions to be placed on the proposals. In the case of Western Australia, in 1996 the Supreme Court overturned recommendations by the Environmental Protection Authority, and a subsequent decision by the Minister for the Environment, on the basis that they had considered extraneous economic factors.

Soon after approving the Gorgon proposal, the Western Australian Government published a State Sustainability Strategy. The strategy calls for sustainability assessments to be built upon existing environmental assessment processes. Having outlined the traditional environmental assessment process, the paper draws out a series of principles that may serve as a starting point for discussion about how to create sustainability assessment processes from environmental assessment processes. Key principles include comprehensiveness and an articulation of the objectives to be met through the assessments.

The notion of sustainability is gradually becoming incorporated into the environmental legal framework. Sustainability assessments may be the next step in the development of that framework.