Review of Environment Policy - Conformance Issues

Issues developed by PricewaterhouseCoopers for evaluating EFIC's compliance with their Environment Policy over the period July 2000 to March 2003

Standards for EIA

1. The process for identifying and assessing significant environmental impacts of export transactions, overseas projects and overseas investments.
2. The extent that EFIC formally determines the conformance and consistency of EIAs with the World Bank Group's Pollution Prevention and Abatement Handbook.
3. The process for monitoring the relevance of the World Bank Group's Pollution Prevention and Abatement Handbook to EFIC's Environment Policy.

Environmental risk screening process

4. The application of the screening process against potential transactions and different types of exports.
5. How conformance with the risk categories defined in the World Bank Group's Pollution Prevention and Abatement Handbook is determined.

Category A

6. The assessment process for category A projects.
7. The process for assessing the completeness and accuracy of EIAs.
8. Where exporters have not adopted the World Bank Group's Pollution Prevention and Abatement Handbook for a category A project, the process for assessing EIAs in-house (including the use of experts).
9. Reporting category A projects externally.

Community issues

10. How the significance of social issues (for example, impacts on vulnerable groups and ethnic minorities) is evaluated by EFIC.
11. For category A projects, the extent that EFIC relies on local public comment to determine the significance of social issues.
12. The circumstances under which EFIC has to conduct an independent assessment of environment or community impacts.
13. The 45 day public consultation process.
14. How EFIC uses the results of the public consultation process.
15. How commercial sensitivity is defined and assessed.

Category B

16. The assessment process for category B projects/transactions.
17. How EFIC determines whether the proposed measures by exporters to prevent, minimise, mitigate or compensate adverse impacts, are adequate.
18. Reporting category B projects/transactions externally.

Category C

19. The assessment process for category C transactions.

Review policies against all transactions

20. How EFIC checks transactions against international commitments defined in treaties, protocols and other declarations.
21. How the Australian customs exclusion list is applied to EFIC transactions.
22. How EFIC treats military or related equipment.

Declining proposals

23. Proposals declined in the last 2 years.

Promoting energy and resource efficiency

24. Proposals in the last two years that promote energy and resource efficiency, renewable resources, cleaner production and waste minimisation.

Public consultation and reporting

25. The EIAs that have been released to the public for comment.