While Africa is currently undergoing a necessary development trajectory, poorly-planned infrastructure projects can have disastrous impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services on which many people rely, and on the economic sustainability of the projects themselves. The mitigation hierarchy is a tool for addressing this problem. It requires that significant negative environmental impacts are sequentially avoided, minimised, rehabilitated, and/or offset.

Although South Africa’s environmental laws and policies call for a hierarchical approach to impact mitigation, it is widely acknowledged that various challenges frequently prevent the aims of the mitigation hierarchy from being achieved in practice. BirdLife South Africa therefore partnered with the Endangered Wildlife Trust and Enviro-Insight to develop Best Practice Guidelines for the Implementation of the Mitigation Hierarchy in South Africa. These Guidelines are intended to complement the Species Environmental Assessment Guideline and the National Biodiversity Offset Guideline by assisting specialists and developers to make appropriate decisions. They will also enable competent authorities to better assess adherence to the mitigation hierarchy in projects seeking environmental authorisation, and will assist them in setting robust licencing conditions to ensure that developers can be held accountable for implementing mitigation activities.

A draft of the guideline is available here: DRAFT MITIGATION HIERARCHY GUIDELINE

MITIGATION HIERARCHY TRAINING VIDEOS

As part of this project, BirdLife South Africa additionally spearheaded the development of the following five training videos on the mitigation hierarchy (click on each heading to access the relevant video):

 

Session 1: Introduction and Background

This session explains the background and motivation for developing a Mitigation Hierarchy Guideline and associated training sessions, focusing on the application of the Mitigation Hierarchy in Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). It also covers relevant legislative and policy requirements, and identifies the key principles and outcomes underpinning the Mitigation Hierarchy.   

Session 1 addresses the following queries: 

• What is the Mitigation Hierarchy? 
• Why is there a need for a Mitigation Hierarchy Guideline? 
• Who is the Mitigation Hierarch Guideline aimed at? 
• What are the legislative requirements underpinning the reasons to consider the Mitigation Hierarchy in EIA? 
• What key principles and outcomes guide the application of Mitigation Hierarchy? 

 

Session 2: The Mitigation Hierarchy and Significance Assessment

This session focuses on the intersection between the Mitigation Hierarchy and the assessment of significance in EIA. It considers how the Mitigation Hierarchy is relevant throughout the EIA process, and briefly covers acceptable methods for determining impact significance as well as some of the pitfalls.  

 Session 2 addresses the following queries: 

• How is the Mitigation Hierarchy relevant to each step in the EIA process? 
• What is the role of significance determination in relation to the Mitigation Hierarchy? 
• What are some of the dos and don’ts when determining impact significance?  
• What is meant by “irreplaceable loss”? 

 

Session 3: The Preventative Component of the Mitigation Hierarchy

This session deals with the Preventative component of the Mitigation Hierarchy, comprising avoidance and minimisation. The meaning of each of these terms is explained, followed by consideration of the categories of avoidance and minimisation, and some of the strategies and tools for their implementation.  

Session 3 addresses the following queries: 

• How is the Preventative component of the Mitigation Hierarchy distinguished? 
• Why is the Preventative component the most important step in the Mitigation Hierarchy? 
• What steps comprise the Preventative component? 
• What are the key strategies and tools for achieving avoidance? 
• What are the key strategies and tools for achieving minimisation? 

 

Session 4: The Remediative Component of the Mitigation Hierarchy

The focus of this session is on the Remediative component of the Mitigation Hierarch, comprising rehabilitation/restoration and compensation/offsets. The relevant terms and the aims of each step are explained, followed by the consideration of some of the strategies and tools for achieving the aims of remediation. The importance of paying attention to residual impacts and cumulative effects is stressed. It is also noted that a separate Guideline on Biodiversity Offsets is available and that the purpose of the Mitigation Hierarchy training is to contextualise offsets in the wider framework of the Mitigation Hierarchy, rather than go into the detail of what biodiversity offsetting involves.  

 Session 4 addresses the following queries: 

• How is the Rehabilitative component of the Mitigation Hierarchy distinguished from the Preventative component? 
• What is the relationship between restoration and remediation? 
• What is the relationship between compensation and offsetting? 
• Why is it important to attend to residual impacts in determining the need for compensation? 

 

Session 5: Applying the Mitigation Hierarchy in EIA Reports and Conditions of Authorisation 

This session highlights the importance of including explicit consideration of the steps in the Mitigation Hierarchy in the outputs of the EIA process, including the Environmental Impact Reports (EIRs), the Environmental Management Programmes (EMPrs) and the Conditions of Authorisation. 

Consideration is given to the role of the specialists, the environmental assessment practitioners (EAPs) and the competent authorities. The notion of trade-offs is described and what is appropriate in this regard. Good and poor examples are provided to demonstrate how the Mitigation Hierarchy should be expressed in the relevant outputs of the EIA process.  

 Session 5 addresses the following queries: 

• What are the responsibilities of the key role players in the EIA in applying the Mitigation Hierarchy? 
• What is meant by trade-offs and what type of trade-offs are appropriate in EIA? 
• What is meant by outcomes focused mitigation measures? 
• How are mitigation measures best communicated in the reports, programmes and conditions of authorisation?