Environmental Planning

Environmental Planning

Our resource management and environmental planners are the champions of collaboration. Our skills and experience with integrated delivery make an enduring impact on the environment, communities, and the clients we serve.

 

Our planning team has the depth of skill and experience on all types of RMA projects, ranging from due diligence and resource consenting to compliance management and auditing. We work closely with clients to establish key outcomes and tasks required to deliver these outcomes.

As multi-disciplinary practitioners, our staff understand the principles of engineering, natural science, and the built environment. Our passion is the natural environment, and our planners pride themselves in understanding the environment and how our infrastructure fits into it. We are not your classic urban planning team, and that’s what sets us apart. We deliver an integrated, pragmatic and value-driven service, drawing from in-house expertise in areas including water infrastructure, ecology and hydrology, or working collaboratively with external advisors. Resource management and environmental planning to us is not an ‘add on’ at the end of the design process but a critical factor incorporated from the project’s onset. 

Our team has New Zealand covered with experienced planners in Auckland, Tauranga, Napier, Wellington, and Christchurch. We are adaptable and can assist clients wherever their projects lie. Ki uta ki tai, from mountains to the sea.

 

Services that we provide:

RMA due diligence and consenting strategy

  • Scoping, scheme and feasibility planning
  • Identifying suitable sites for your project from an RMA perspective
  • Confirming the consenting requirements for your project
  • Assessing consenting risks and how these risks can be managed through the consenting process
  • Developing consenting strategy for an efficient consenting process

 

Resource consent applications and assessment of environmental effects (AEE)

  • Pre-application meetings with councils
  • Preparing resource consent applications and AEE’s
  • Advising on and managing technical inputs from specialists
  • Drafting/reviewing resource consent conditions
  • Presenting expert planning evidence at Council and Environment Court Hearings and attending mediation on behalf of the client
  • Processing resource consent applications on behalf of local government clients

 

Consultation, mediation, and conflict resolution

  • Managing iwi engagement and liaison throughout the consenting process
  • Preparing consultation strategies
  • Landowner/affected party consultation
  • Managing community liaison groups

 

Policy development and plan changes

  • Preparing private and public plan change documents
  • Preparing submissions to plan changes
  • Presenting expert planning evidence at Council Hearings and attending mediation on behalf of clients
  • Policy research

 

Environmental management & compliance

  • Preparing environmental management plans
  • Managing compliance with resource consent conditions
  • Conducting independent compliance audits, e.g. Green Star

 

Planning Staff