Specialised Environmental Impact Assessment Services

Metago's team of environmental practitioners has managed a wide rage of environmental impact assessment projects for both green-field and brown-field mining, energy and chemical sector related developments. These projects are located in South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique, Angola, Ghana, Guinea Bissau and Tanzania. Metago's philosophy is to design the environmental impact assessment process in an integrated manner that promotes legal compliance, project risk management and meaningful stakeholder engagement. Each of these components is described further below.

As a minimum, environmental impact assessment projects are designed to comply with relevant national legislation in terms of both process and outcomes. In many instances, the internal corporate standards of our clients dictate that the project processes and outcomes are aligned with a higher level of performance than legal compliance and as such cognisance is often taken of World Bank, International Council for Mining and Metals, and other best practice guidelines.

Project risk is managed through an iterative approach between the technical project team and the environmental assessment team. Legal, environmental, social, political, technical and economic factors are reviewed at key stages in the development of projects and where required, Metago facilitates risk management and problem solving on the basis of its considerable experience. This interaction is initiated at the outset and continues through to final project design and implementation as required.

Stakeholders (such as localised interested and affected parties, non government organisations and government officials) are managed by the Metago team in an integrated fashion, as part of the environmental assessment process. This integrated approach focuses the stakeholder management process on project requirements. In broad terms, the stakeholder management process comprises an initial social scan and an ongoing public involvement process. The purpose of the social scan is to identify key role players at the outset and to design appropriate strategies for integrating these role players into the assessment process. The ongoing public participation processes are all built on the principles of transparency, honesty and professional integrity