Community engagement requirements

You must get a permission to conduct activities that have risk of harm to human health and the environment. Visit Get help finding the right permission.

We make permission decisions under the Environment Protection Act 2017 and Environment Protection Regulations 2021.

You should engage with anyone who may be impacted by your proposed activity – for example, a neighbouring resident or business. You need to do this before submitting your application.

Engagement is a requirement for some permission types – such as development licences and development licence exemptions. For more detail about the engagement requirements for each permission type, see our Charter of consultation.

Information about your community engagement helps us to consider:

• human rights under the Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities Act 2006(opens in a new window)
• the principles of environment protection
• if anyone else's interests are affected by the proposal
• if your application is consistent with the Environment Protection Act and Environment Protection Regulations 2021 and will not result in an unacceptable risk to human health or environment.

Our Regulatory communications and engagement policy provides more detail about how we communicate and work with people under the Act.

Applications that require community engagement

You must engage with the community before you apply for relevant permissions. These permissions include:

• authorisations to discharge or dispose of waste in an emergency or for public hardship
• authorisations to commission, repair, decommission or dismantle an industrial plant or equipment
• development licences
• development licence exemptions.

We also encourage engagement for other permission types. We may ask you to undertake engagement. We may also conduct engagement as part of our assessment.

If you do not conduct this engagement, we may not accept your application or may take longer to assess it.

Guidance

Our Charter of consultation outlines our commitment to engagement.

We have published detailed information about community engagement to be conducted before you apply for a Development Licence or a Development Licence Exemption. Read Pre-application engagement guidance.

Effective pre-application engagement can support dialogue with your community and stakeholders. This can lead to greater understanding between all parties. It should inform development of your application. When done well, it will reduce EPA Requests for Information related to engagement. This can lead to faster decision times on applications.

You must provide a report on community and stakeholder engagement conducted. This should be submitted with your application.

See our community and stakeholder engagement plan/report template.

If no pre-application engagement was conducted, you must still prepare a report outlining why this action was considered justified.

To support stakeholder identification, we have produced a stakeholder mapping template.

Traditional Owners have rights and interests across their Country. We recommend that you consider Traditional Owners engagement at the earliest stage of developing your application.

As you conduct your engagement, list your contacts in an engagement register. If agreed by participants, provide this engagement register with your application.

If you lodge an application whilst conducting engagement activities, a subsequent community and stakeholder engagement report should still be prepared. This should address the matters outlined on the community and stakeholder engagement plan/report template.

More information

The Engagement Institute has further guidance and engagement resources on their website.

You can also get an engagement professional to guide you through the process. This may be helpful depending on the scale of engagement you need to do. We recommend this for development licences that may have a high level of community interest and concern.