Garry Middle (ii)

Integrating Environmental Assessment as part of regional strategic land use planning: A step towards integrated sustainability assessment

Garry Middle
Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Curtin University, WA

Abstract:
The EPA has been carrying out informal non-statutory strategic environmental assessments (SEA) of selected regional strategic land use plans in WA since the early 1990s, although it wasn’t until the amendments to the Environmental Protection Act (1986) in 2005 that SEA became a statutory process. These early informal SEAs were used largely to flag the key environmental issues that planning should take into account so as to avoid later formal environmental assessments of proposals. More recently, the Western Australian Planning Commission (WAPC) has initiated regional planning exercises for four regions outside the Perth metropolitan area. Given the environmental sensitivity of these areas, it is likely that environmental assessments of these regional planning exercises are likely. The WAPC has raised concerns that such assessments could unduly delay the planning for these regions.

This paper provides an overview of the history of SEA of land use planning in WA, and, based on that experience, proposes a model of how EPA assessments of this new regional planning could be carried out in an integrated manner that should allow proper consideration of environmental issues without causing significant delays in the planning process. Such an integrated approach could well be seen as sustainability assessment.

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