Enabling Public Partipitation

Section 24 of the South Africa Constitution guarantees everyone the right to an environment that is not harmful to their health or well-being. This right is supported by the National Environmental Management Act (NEMA). The Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process, regulated in terms of NEMA requires meaningful public participation in environmental decision making.  Interested and affected parties must be informed about proposed developments, have access to relevant information, and be given an opportunity to submit comments and objections before environmental authorisation for a project is granted.  

This participatory approach in intended to promote transparency, accountability, and informed decision-making while helping to protect the environment and the rights of affected communities. 

In practice, however, the EIA procedures are complicated and may be difficult for individuals and communities to understand when and how to engage in the EIA process.  Obstacles to engagement include the following: 

• The legislation governing EIA is multi-faceted and comprises numerous regulations and sub-regulations.
• EIA reports are often long and have many annexures making it difficult to distinguish key information to focus on 
• Given the number of timed stages involved in the EIA process, it may challenging to work out when you ought to comment, how long you have to comment and what your rights are regarding access of information. 

The more people that become involved in an EIA process, the more likely it is that the authorities will come to a fair decision and attach suitable conditions to an authorisation. Whilst the Policy and Advocacy Team comment on strategic developments, we do not have capacity to become involved in local development decisions and rely on Bird Clubs and our members to play an active role in safeguarding their environments and sensitive species from development threats and associated negative impacts.