AUSTRALIA: SMEC/AiGroup to develop Guidelines for Public Environmental Reporting

The project aims to develop a set of guidelines to facilitate and assist voluntary public environmental reporting in Australia. The purpose of this initiative provide a framework for organisations to be able to produce reports with consistent and reliable information that can be benchmarked to allow stakeholders to assess the reports in the context of an industry sector, locality of operations, best practice, financial performance and/or regulatory compliance.

Since the success of this project depends heavily on the input of stakeholders, the development process involves significant consultation including workshops during August in five major capital cities to:

• inform stakeholders on the guideline development process;
• ascertain stakeholder views on what they would like to be incorporated in the generic national guidelines in terms of reporting ingredients and performance indicators; and
• seek their views of how reports should be prepared and presented.

Stakeholder groups identified as being crucial to the initiative include small, medium and large enterprises from all industry sectors, government and public sector organisations, regulators, non-government organisations and interested community groups.

For details of how to participate in workshops, contact Jill Knight at SMEC.