Environmental approvals are a coordination problem disguised as a technical one.
A typical development application needs:
- A Statement of Environmental Effects or Environmental Impact Statement
- A flora and fauna assessment (and possibly a BDAR)
- A heritage report and Aboriginal Due Diligence
- A bushfire assessment if the site is mapped
- An arborist report if trees are affected
- A flood and stormwater assessment
- An erosion and sediment control plan
- A water quality impact assessment
Each one is written by a different specialist. Each one references the others. When they don't line up, council issues a Request for Information and your project sits while everyone passes the document back and forth. We've seen developments lose three to six months not because of any single technical issue, but because seven different consultants were never managed as one team.
That's the gap Eko's Project Management fills.
We run the environmental workstream of your DA, end to end.
- Pathway assessment, week one. Before any specialist is engaged, we work out the right approval pathway for your project — Complying Development Certificate, Development Application, Review of Environmental Factors, or Environmental Impact Statement. Getting this wrong is the single most expensive mistake in environmental approvals. We get it right at the start.
- Specialist scoping and engagement. We identify which environmental specialists your project actually needs, scope their work, and engage them under our coordination. You sign one contract with us. We manage the rest. No more chasing six consultants for status updates.
- Quality coordination. Each specialist report gets reviewed for internal consistency, cross-referencing against the others, and alignment with the SEPP's and council's local environmental plans. Issues get caught and resolved before lodgement, not after.
- Lodgement and RFI management. We prepare the lodgement package, lodge through the NSW Planning Portal or Queensland's DA Online, and manage every Request for Information from council and referral agencies. If an RFI comes in on the bushfire report, we don't forward it to you, we route it to the bushfire consultant, draft the response, and bring it back to you for sign-off.
- Conditions of consent translation. When approval is granted, we translate the conditions into a plain-English compliance schedule your construction team can actually follow. Included in the project management fee, not as a separate engagement.
What we bring in-house, what we coordinate.
Delivered in-house
- Statement of Environmental Effects and Review of Environmental Factors documentation
- Water quality, flood, and stormwater assessments
- Erosion and sediment control planning
- Construction water management planning
- Groundwater and surface water sampling and analysis
Coordinated through trusted specialists
- Flora and fauna assessments and BDARs
- Heritage and Aboriginal Due Diligence
- Bushfire assessments
- Arborist reports
- Contaminated land assessments
- Geotechnical assessments
Eko's specialist network has been built over ten years of working with the same people on hard projects. We don't sub out work to cheapest-bidder consultants, we work with people whose reports we've read and whose judgement we trust.
Who it's for
- Developers with projects entering the DA stage in SEQ or NSW
- Builders working under design-and-construct contracts with environmental obligations
- Project managers running multi-disciplinary approvals
- Landowners assembling sites for sale who need approvals in place to maximise value
Best results when: we're engaged at feasibility or early concept stage, before specialists are individually contracted.
Fixed-fee project management, scoped to your DA.
We don't charge percentage-of-project-value or open-ended hourly fees. Our project management fee is a fixed scope based on the size and complexity of your DA, paid in milestones: at engagement, at lodgement, and on determination. Specialist consultant fees are passed through at cost with no markup.