Ensuring environmental compliance

Environmental compliance assurance consists of three interconnected components:

1. Promotion of compliance by helping regulated entities understand compliance requirements (e.g., through training, advice and guidance) and providing regulatory and financial incentives.
2. Monitoring of compliance of regulated entities through tools such as planned and ad hoc on-site inspections, examining ambient monitoring data and self-monitoring reports by companies, and processing and addressing reports from the public or police investigations.
3. Enforcing compliance by sanctioning non-compliant entities using administrative, civil and criminal enforcement tools and obliging them to rectify the damage caused, with the aim of restoring compliance and deterring future non-compliance.

Policy makers and regulators should focus their compliance assurance efforts on activities presenting the highest risk to human health and the environment to increase the effectiveness of compliance assurance while reducing administrative costs. To this end, they need to have an overview of all regulated entities, a methodology for assessing their environmental risk and a process for applying the methodology to their compliance assurance activities such as planning inspections.

The environmental compliance assurance chain consists of regulators, inspectors, the police, customs, prosecutors and judges. These different authorities need to have sufficient capacity and skills and must co-operate effectively with each other. Specialised environmental police and prosecution units and dedicated environmental courts should be established as appropriate. The performance of enforcement authorities should be regularly evaluated using outcome-based indicators.

Compliance assurance is a crucial element of the iterative, cyclical process of environmental regulation as it links legislative requirements with the assessment of policy implementation and feedback allowing adjustment of the legal and policy framework.

Effective environmental compliance has many benefits to the environment, society and economy, including:

• protection of the environment and public health 
• achievement of better environmental outcomes at lower overall costs 
• promotion of a level playing field among companies 
• increase of investor confidence by reducing business risk 
• stimulation of innovation and creation of new jobs 
• strengthened public trust in governmental environmental policy 
• promotion of the rule of law and good governance 
• promotion of transparency.