At IEMA, environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance is practical: understand the risks, act on opportunities and make sustainability part of everyday work. This approach guides IEMA’s employee-led ESG Committee, which turns good intentions into measurable action across our business, our people, and our community.

For a small business, the Committee demonstrates practical ESG leadership. It provides a dedicated forum to identify, prioritise, and progress initiatives that support IEMA’s values. In doing so, it helps embed sustainability into business decisions and workplace culture.

What is IEMA’s ESG Committee and How Does It Drive Sustainable Business Practices?

The Committee provides a structured forum for reviewing ESG priorities, tracking progress against objectives and reporting outcomes to company leadership, ensuring accountability and continuous improvement. It provides oversight, coordination and momentum for initiatives that reduce IEMA’s environmental footprint, strengthen employee wellbeing and safety, support the community, and integrate sustainability into day-to-day operations.

The Committee comprises four competitively selected roles: Chair, Wellness, Environment & Community, and Health & Safety. This structure provides dedicated oversight and clear leadership for each focus area, supporting a mature and well-governed approach to ESG.

Why Practical ESG Action Matters for Business Performance and Sustainability Outcomes

As sustainability advisors, IEMA believes it is important to demonstrate the behaviours and practices we recommend to clients. The ESG Committee helps ensure IEMA can lead by example, continuously improving our own environmental, social and governance performance while supporting better outcomes for our clients.

Effective ESG is about more than disclosure. It requires action, accountability and continuous improvement. The Committee helps ensure IEMA’s sustainability initiatives are prioritised, tracked and embedded into the way the business works, rather than treated as a tick-the-box exercise.

By bringing together employees from across the business, the Committee creates a practical link between IEMA’s sustainability strategy and everyday operations. It also helps identify ESG risks and opportunities across employee engagement, health and safety, carbon emissions, sustainable procurement, waste management, governance and community impact.

FY2026 ESG Initiatives: Delivering Measurable Sustainability and Community Impact

Reducing Food Waste and Supporting Communities Through Practical ESG Action

In FY2026, the Committee helped coordinate an OzHarvest Cooking for a Cause team event. IEMA team members prepared nutritious meals for local charities and diverted 35 kilograms of food from landfill, avoiding the equivalent of 35 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions. This hands-on initiative combined food waste reduction, community contribution and team connection in a practical and memorable way.

Embedding Employee Wellbeing into Everyday Work Practices

The Committee champions initiatives that put people first. IEMA introduced Wellness Hours in May 2026, giving every employee two hours each month to recharge in a way that works for them, whether through exercise, time with family, an appointment or simply taking time to reset. Since the Wellness Hours initiative was launched, IEMA team members have logged 63 hours across activities supporting their physical, mental and social wellbeing, from exercise and healthcare appointments to family events, hobbies and community connection. The message is simple: employee wellbeing should be part of how we work, not something squeezed in after hours.

Strengthening Workplace Health and Safety Governance

Health and safety governance remain central to IEMA’s ESG approach. Throughout FY2026, the Committee has contributed to reviews of IEMA’s HSEC policy and business risk assessment, as well as updates to safety resources, training and certification registers, and safety notices. These improvements help keep IEMA’s systems current, practical and aligned with office, field and client-based work.

Improving Carbon Accounting, Emissions Data and Decarbonisation Performance

The Committee supports IEMA’s commitment to business decarbonisation through annual greenhouse gas emissions calculations, the identification of emissions hotspots and reduction opportunities, and process improvements that provide clearer visibility of the company’s carbon footprint. This includes strengthening year-on-year carbon accounting methodologies and moving from spend-based estimates towards more accurate activity-based data where possible.

Through improved carbon accounting and targeted emissions reduction efforts, IEMA reduced its FY2026 greenhouse gas emissions to 168 tCO₂e; an 18% reduction from FY2025, while achieving our lowest emissions intensity on record. For IEMA, measuring emissions is not the finish line. It is the foundation for better decisions, stronger governance and more targeted emissions reduction.

The same principles that IEMA helps clients to apply to their carbon accounting and decarbonisation initiatives are also applied internally to IEMA, ensuring our business continually improves the quality, accuracy and usefulness of our emissions data.

Looking Ahead: Building IEMA’s ESG Framework for Long-Term Sustainability Success

IEMA’s ESG Committee continues to evolve as the business grows. A key focus for FY2027 is developing a formal ESG Framework that establishes clear objectives, responsibilities and performance measures, providing a roadmap for continuous improvement and supporting transparent reporting on IEMA’s ESG performance.

For IEMA, ESG is not a standalone program. It is part of how we operate, make decisions and contribute to positive outcomes for our people, clients, communities and the environment. The ESG Committee helps turn that commitment into action.

An effective Erosion and Sediment Control Plan (ESCP) is not just a desktop design exercise. The best ESCPs combine mapping, catchment interpretation, field verification, project team input and progressive review so erosion controls, sediment controls, runoff management and drainage treatments perform under real site conditions.

“The key lesson from our experience is that an ESCP only becomes truly effective when the desktop design is tested against real site conditions. Mapping tells us where problems may occur; walking the site shows us where the real risks are.”

— Maddie Stojcevski, Senior Consultant, IEMA

In environmental management, mine site rehabilitation, civil construction and land development, some of the most important lessons are not found in drawings, reports, aerial imagery or desktop assessments. They are found by walking the ground, observing how water actually moves across a site and testing whether erosion and sediment controls can be constructed, maintained and relied upon during rainfall.

Desktop ESCP design is essential, but it is only the starting point

That has certainly been our experience when developing and implementing ESCPs. A plan can be technically sound, professionally prepared and based on the best available mapping, contours, drainage lines, catchment boundaries and construction staging information, yet still miss the small site features that determine whether it will perform when the rain arrives.

The simple reality is that runoff does not read drawings. It follows the landform, slope breaks, wheel ruts, depressions, compacted tracks, disturbed soils and preferential flow paths that exist on site. For erosion and sediment control practitioners, this is the difference between a plan that satisfies an obligation and a plan that functions as a practical environmental management tool.

What field verification reveals that desktop assessment can miss

During erosion and sediment control site inspections, we have encountered features that are either invisible, simplified or easily underestimated during desktop ESCP design, including:

• Redundant fire trails that intercept and redirect overland flow
• Wheel ruts and informal vehicle tracks that concentrate runoff
• Animal trails that create small but persistent drainage pathways
• Minor depressions, low points and ponding areas that are not obvious on broad-scale contours
• Hidden drainage paths through vegetation, stockpiles, access tracks or disturbed ground
• Legacy earthworks that have altered ground levels, compaction and surface drainage behaviour

Individually, these features can look minor. In practice, they can be the difference between a sediment fence, diversion drain, check dam, sediment basin or stabilised access point that works and one that is quickly overwhelmed by concentrated runoff.

A wheel rut can become a preferential flow path. A shallow depression can concentrate runoff. An animal trail can redirect water around a sediment control structure that appeared perfectly positioned on the plan. A small site drainage feature can change the performance of an entire control sequence if it is not identified before installation.

Why site inspections improve ESCP performance

This is why ESCP field verification is so important. It gives environmental consultants, construction managers, site supervisors and contractors the chance to test assumptions, identify erosion and sediment risks that mapping alone cannot show, and speak directly with the people who will build, inspect and maintain the controls.

In our experience, the most useful question is not simply whether the ESCP is compliant, technically correct or aligned with a guideline. It is this:

“Can this plan actually be built, maintained and perform as intended under real site conditions?”

That question brings constructability, maintenance, rainfall response, soil disturbance, slope management and site drainage into the discussion early. It also helps avoid common ESCP implementation issues such as controls being installed in the wrong location, controls being bypassed by runoff, maintenance access being overlooked or erosion protection being delayed until after ground disturbance has already occurred.

Common failure sequence when site-specific drainage risks are missed

When site-specific erosion and sediment control risks are missed, the sequence is often familiar:

An unidentified flow path creates unexpected runoff. A diversion drain, sediment fence or other control becomes overloaded or bypassed. Sediment is mobilised. Turbid water moves into drainage lines or downstream receiving environments. The response shifts from planned erosion and sediment control management to reactive maintenance after rainfall.

By then, the opportunity to prevent the issue may already have passed.

Desktop planning remains essential. It provides the baseline data, catchment interpretation, risk assessment and design framework needed to develop effective erosion controls and sediment controls. But for complex construction sites, mine sites, infrastructure projects and rehabilitation areas, desktop planning should be treated as the starting point, not the finishing point.

Five elements of a stronger Erosion and Sediment Control Plan

The strongest ESCPs we have worked with tend to combine five practical elements:

• Desktop assessment to understand catchments, slopes, soil exposure, drainage lines and likely construction disturbance.
• Field verification to verify controls highlighted during desktop assessment and test how the plan can be implemented under real site conditions.
• Construction team engagement to test whether erosion and sediment controls can be built, accessed and maintained safely.
• Understanding actual drainage behaviour so controls respond to observed flow paths rather than assumed flow paths.
• Progressive review to ensure controls change as site conditions do, ensuring up to date management practices.

Together, these steps turn an ESCP from a compliance document into a practical management tool, one that reflects how water is likely to behave once works begin and one that supports better environmental outcomes, reduced sediment loss, clearer responsibilities and more efficient maintenance after rainfall.

One experience has stayed with us

While working alongside a civil construction contractor on a mine site, we made a habit of physically inspecting each proposed work area before finalising the erosion and sediment controls. It was not a box-ticking exercise. It was a practical conversation about how the site would actually behave once machinery moved in, ground was disturbed and rainfall interacted with the changed surface.

We walked the site, discussed constructability, traced flow paths, challenged assumptions and refined designs together. Those conversations often changed the location, configuration or sequencing of controls, not because the desktop plan was wrong, but because the field inspection revealed more precise information.

In several instances, what appeared to be a minor track, shallow rut or subtle low point became an important drainage consideration. By identifying those features before installation, the project team could adjust controls before rainfall tested the system. The resulting plans were more practical, easier to maintain and more effective in managing erosion and sediment risks.

The lesson was clear, and it continues to shape how we approach ESCP development, site-based environmental management and construction-phase erosion and sediment control:

Desktop assessments identify potential problems. Site inspections reveal real ones. Good planning sets the direction, but practical implementation determines the outcome.

Frequently asked questions about ESCP field verification

What is ESCP field verification? ESCP field verification is the process of checking an Erosion and Sediment Control Plan against the actual site conditions before or during implementation. It confirms drainage behaviour, constructability, control locations, access requirements and maintenance needs.

Why is field verification important for erosion and sediment control? Field verification is important because small site features such as ruts, depressions, informal tracks, animal trails and legacy earthworks can influence runoff and sediment movement. These features may not be obvious in desktop mapping but can affect how controls perform during rainfall.

When should an ESCP be reviewed? An ESCP should be reviewed before construction starts, after major site changes, following significant rainfall, when controls are damaged or ineffective, and whenever new drainage pathways or erosion risks become apparent.

Who should be involved in ESCP implementation? Effective ESCP implementation usually involves environmental professionals, engineers, site supervisors, civil contractors and maintenance crews. Involving the construction team early helps ensure controls are practical, buildable and maintainable.

For anyone involved in developing or implementing Erosion and Sediment Control Plans, our advice is simple: do the desktop ESCP work but make time to walk the ground. The field will almost always tell you something the map cannot. For construction projects, mine sites, rehabilitation works and land development activities, that site-based insight can be the difference between a plan that simply exists and a plan that genuinely protects soil, water quality and downstream environments.