Environmental auditing in Victoria
The Environmental Audit System has operated in Victoria since 1989 and led a national movement for auditing environmental performance and the condition of the environment.
The Environment Protection Act 1970 provides for the statutory appointment of environmental auditors and their responsibilities to ensure that high quality, rigorous environmental audits are conducted by appropriately qualified professionals.
Appointed environmental auditors may be engaged by any individual or organisation from private or public sectors, to provide independent, objective environmental advice.
The scope of an environmental audit may be narrowly defined for a small area of land focussing on a single segment of the environment such as the soil and groundwater. Alternatively the scope may be as broad as all the land-use activities with a potential to generate waste within a catchment and the impacts they may have on all parts of the environment.
The Environmental Audit System currently has three well-established applications that cover contaminated land, industrial facilities and natural resources.
The most extensive use of the system to date has been by planning authorities, government agencies and the private sector to provide assurance that potentially contaminated land is suitable for its intended use, or to advise what is required to make the land suitable for its intended use.
An increasing application of the Audit System is to assess the risk of any possible harm or detriment to a segment of the environment caused by the setting-up and/or operation of industrial facilities (e.g., a landfill, a petrochemical complex, etc.), and to recommend adequate measures to reduce the identified risks when necessary.
More recently, these risk of harm audits have been applied to the natural environment. Environmental auditors have been involved in auditing the management of the Goulburn River and annually determining compliance of public land timber harvesting operations with the Code of Forest Practice. In response to this increasing use of audit, EPA developed the natural resources auditor category in 2006.
The continued success of auditing in various applications has shown the Audit System to be robust and flexible.There is an opportunity to learn from the application of environmental audit in the past and to apply its principles and framework in other increasingly important areas of environmental management, such as:
- infrastructure development
- urban services
- primary production
- natural resource management.
Managing the system
EPA administers the Environmental Audit System and maintains its ongoing integrity through:
- a rigorous process to appoint auditors
- a statutory basis that requires the appropriate conduct of auditors, with suspension or revocation of appointment if breached
- significant financial and custodial penalties for the provision of false or misleading information
- requiring environmental auditors to undertake audits only within their field of expertise and that of their expert support team, and
- regular review of the work of appointed auditors.
Contributing to the system
EPA has developed guidelines for the appointment of environmental auditors and the conduct of audits.
As the Audit System continues to evolve, existing guidelines are updated and/or new guidelines are developed.
EPA welcomes input from stakeholders, such as industry, government agencies, resource managers and the community, on possible applications of the Audit System.
For more information on Victoria's Environmental Audit System, send an email.