environmental planning with central and local government and other regional stakeholders such as Maori, major transportation players, key industry representatives and so on.
Within this policy framework is a prescriptive framework of regulation and enforcement.
The new Resource Management Act enabled regional councils to prepare regional plans for a given geographic area and/or on a particular resource management issue. Development had become such an issue for the Auckland Region that the Auckland Regional Plan: Sediment Control34, which defines the regulatory controls on land-disturbing activities, was the first regional plan prepared in Auckland.
Again, there are many other pieces of legislation and other regional plans that need to be considered, but the summary below focuses on the Act and the Regional Plan. Together these enabled the Council to exert strong regulatory control on land-disturbing activities.
Under review at the time of writing for inclusion in a Unitary Plan, the Auckland Regional Plan: Sediment Control sets up a regulatory framework that defines:
The Resource Management Act (also currently under review) provides for resource consent application procedures that enable the Council to require applicants to assess the environmental effects of their land-disturbing activities and to prepare erosion and sediment control plans to avoid, minimize, remedy or mitigate them. It also requires monitoring of compliance by regulators and consent holders (developers and their agents).
The Act provides a range of enforcement procedures including (from lesser to major) infringement, abatement and enforcement notices; and prosecutions. In New Zealand, prosecutions are a criminal conviction with potentially heavy fines (including for ongoing offences) and up to two years imprisonment.
Surprise!
The thing that most surprised us about the use of enforcement on major construction sites in Auckland was the relief felt by responsible operators that the ‘fly-by-night’ operators, who undercut prices by skipping or skimping on environmental controls, were finally being called to account.
Many people who work in the construction sector are outdoors types. While they didn’t like the sediment running off their work sites into streams and onto beaches, they thought it was an inevitable consequence of progress and that it wasn’t possible to do anything about it. We got a strong sense of their relief that finally there was something they could do to manage what everyone had thought was an intractable problem.
Even when the responsible operators were penalised for some reason, they took it in good faith. In the next chapter we’ll see where this startling and apparently counter-intuitive development led the industry.
Step 5:Technical guidelines: a performance benchmark
The term ‘training’, as indicated in Chapter 1, implies the existence of a measurable performance standard or benchmark. In a context where environmental performance is required by legally enforceable permits, a detailed specification is essential so that it is very clear what people have to do in order to comply with them.
For erosion and sediment control, such specifications usually focus on structural controls, though many are increasingly referring to non-structural procedures and processes as well. An example of a non-structural control is a pre-construction meeting between the permit holder and his or her agents (the consultants and contractors) and the regulatory body. Sometimes other stakeholders, including community or interest group representatives, may attend and such meetings are now included in the conditions attached to the project’s authorisations.
Structural controls are often called ‘best management practices’, or BMPs (though the term could also refer to non-structural measures, too), and these BMPs are usually set out in a technical guideline.
Such guidelines are not legal documents in themselves, but they effectively become enforceable when attached to the relevant environmental authorizations. While they can and do change over time to reflect new knowledge, they define current best practice against which training and both structural and non-structural measures can be assessed. This is what enables evaluation of the effectiveness of the erosion and sediment control measures on the ground, the BMPs themselves, and also, of course, the training.
The introduction of the new TP90 erosion and sediment control guideline in 1999 (and its updates since then) provided much more technical detail, and was a significant step in helping the development sector comply with the new policies and regulations.
Development of a new guideline from scratch is a big project, even when there are many good examples to follow. Follow best practice: involve the development sector and other stakeholders right from the start. They will help weed out unrealistic assumptions and pick up errors that fade into invisibility, as we become over-familiar with our magnum opus.
 | Look at the Box below to find out more about what ‘best practice’ means for a technical guideline. |
My observations of TP90 and my experience with preparing other guidelines,35 including a new erosion and sediment control guideline for Canterbury in New Zealand’s South Island36, have shown me the significant benefits the partnership process yields in both the technical quality and industry acceptance of the new requirements.
What is ‘best practice’ for developing (or reviewing) a technical guideline?
As environmental experts, we are understandably keen to leap straight into the technical specifications of our guideline, be it for stream bank planting, water pollution control, erosion and sediment control or whatever our topic of concern may be.
But it’s a great idea to step back and think about our pet guideline from a wider perspective. Who’s going to use it? Why would they believe us when we say they should use it and that it will work?
Recently I was asked to think about ‘contemporary international best practice’ erosion and sediment control as part of a review of TP9037. It was easy to find a good relevant definition for this: it was from the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA), and said38 ‘scientifically sound techniques [that] are the best practices known today’.
Then I started
