ENVIRONMENTAL AUDITING - ARTIFICIAL WATERWAY DEVELOPMENTS IN WESTERN-AUSTRALIA

In recent years, environmental auditing has emerged as a means of examining the effectiveness of past environmental impact assessment in an attempt to identify ways of improving the utility and efficiency of future assessments. In this paper, an environmental audit of a range of artificial waterway developments in Western Australia is reported. In particular, three types of audit are reported: a compliance audit in which an assessment is made of whether the conditions established by statutory bodies for mitigating the environmental impacts of the developments have been implemented and enforced; a prediction audit in which the nature and accuracy of impact predictions is evaluated; and an EIA procedures audit to evaluate the effectiveness of the overall EIA process. The results of the audit reported here are encouraging in so far as the level of compliance and prediction accuracy are concerned, although problems with the lack of monitoring data, which have beset earlier audits, prevented follow-up on many impact predictions. © 1992 Academic Press Limited.