Environmental and Social Impact Assessment and Planning

Due to heightened environmental awareness, public interest in sustainable development, and stringent environmental protection laws and regulations, projects often require environmental approvals prior to being launched.

Our Assessment and Environmental Planning teams specialise in the process of gaining approvals, permitting, licensing, and planning support. We work with organisations focused on investing, developing, or expanding existing assets, seeking on-going maintenance for their operations and infrastructure, or the closure of their facilities. We advise at the strategic, investment, procurement, due diligence, planning implementation, construction, and monitoring phases of any project. In each case, we work to deliver positive outcomes for all stakeholders.

Local Expertise, Worldwide

With our multidisciplinary team of scientists, sociologists, archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, engineers, planners, geographers, heritage specialists, economists, and communications experts, we are well positioned to analyse the living environments in which projects are undertaken. We combine our experience with global standards such as the CDP, Equator Principles, African Development Bank Integrated Safeguards System and International Finance Corporation’s Performance Standards, with a thorough understanding of the local regulatory systems and cultural sensitivities. Our work reflects the specific needs of particular geographies or sectors.

Our ability to draw on expertise from our offices around the world, across a broad range of environmental, social, economic, and technical disciplines throughout the firm, is a key factor in delivering successful results. We offer both management and technical delivery capabilities, embedding our impact assessment expertise in projects across all sectors.

Keeping Up With a Changing Environment

From climate change considerations to integrated assessments – combining ethical, health, equality, environment, and social dimensions – our experts have insights on the latest developments in the field. Ever-evolving technologies enable digital delivery and augmented reality, providing clients with a very concrete and realistic understanding of our work. There is also a greater focus on stakeholder engagement, public consultation, and strategic planning, where we have extensive experience.

Community Focused

We help clients to position and optimize their projects with a view to maximizing acceptance from the populations that are affected either directly or indirectly. A project’s social acceptability hinges on multi-sector studies and opinion or perception surveys, as well as on consistent communications with stakeholders. These processes make it possible not only to implement projects with higher levels of social acceptance, but also to adapt them more effectively to the local context.

In addition, our strategic planning team helps clients to design and implement long-term strategic and economic planning objectives, including sustainable development planning by conducting studies which include: