EHP - Offsets
Date: 29-Jun-2017
The Department of Environment and Heritage Protection has recently released a new “mechanism” – “Flexible options for managing point source water emissions: A voluntary market-based mechanism for nutrient management” available here.
It provides an alternative investment option for operators of point sources to meet their discharge requirements, while delivering an improvement in water quality in the receiving environment. It applies to the management of total nitrogen and total phosphorous only, and typical offset examples include upper catchment improvement works. All such options will require monitoring programs to quantify benefits.
The mechanism builds on trials undertaken by members in SEQ in conjunction with EHP over the past couple of years. qldwater has been advocating strongly for the introduction of such options to mitigate the significant cost of treatment plant upgrades for some time.
The Department has commenced preparation of a technical assessment guideline to steer future applications and assessments. In the meantime the department welcomes further interest from water utilities and others in applying the mechanism and invites members to contact their regional EHP office to discuss in more detail http://www.ehp.qld.gov.au/
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