The Environmental Roadmap: A Management Tool to Address Critical Project Environmental Management Issues

Abstract

Abstract Many decisions of critical importance to project success are taken at an early project stage. These decisions are increasingly expensive to reverse as the project matures. Identifying critical environmental management issues and incorporating them into the strategic decision making process at this stage can greatly benefit projects executed in a particularly sensitive natural, social, regulatory and political environment. Early Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA) may be undertaken to provide input into this process. However, ESIA requires substantial input data that may not be available at this stage. Alternatively, a simple identification of key environmental and social issues may be conducted using available information. Although beneficial, these traditional methodologies cannot address the full range of critical environmental management issues. The Environmental Roadmap methodology and tool has been developed to overcome these limitations. The Environmental Roadmap combines critical issue identification, decision support analysis, and integrated project planning into a single decision support package for the project management team. The criticality of an environmental management issue is determined by its potential to drive project development decisions. Decision support analysis includes, inter alia, evaluation of main project options in terms of environmental and social sensitivities, effects on schedule and cost, and impact on stakeholder relationships. Integrated project planning is conducted to map key environmental management activities and deliverables as a single interrelated process flow that includes management of regulatory approvals, lender interface, public consultation and stakeholder engagement, engineering and project execution interface, environmental risk management, and review and assurance processes. The Environmental Roadmap methodology and tool has been successfully applied during an early stage of an oil development project offshore Sakhalin Island, Russia.