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Ecologically sustainable development
Our commitment to ecologically sustainable development
Sydney Water's enabling legislation, the Sydney Water Act 1994 (NSW), clearly defines the organisation's objectives, including our social and environmental responsibilities.
Set out in the legislation is a principal objective that Sydney Water will protect the environment by conducting operations in compliance with the principles of ecologically sustainable development.
Since 1995 our program for achieving this objective has involved policy development, business planning, performance audits and external communications.
In November 2000, the Board of Sydney Water adopted a new ESD Policy. The policy identifies four principles of ESD: Conservation of Biological Diversity and Ecological Integrity, Precautionary Principle, Inter-generational Equity, and Improved Valuation and Pricing of Environmental Resources. The policy recognises that to successfully implement ESD Sydney Water needs to drive ESD through the strategic planning process, during decision making and through day-to-day operations. We must ensure that ESD underpins everything we do.
Guided by our ESD Policy and ESD Principles, we will continue to work towards full integration of environmental, social and economic considerations throughout our operations, from strategic planning processes to capital works decision-making, impact assessment and pricing arrangements.
Sydney Water has developed a suite of sustainability indicators through extensive public consultation. These indicators complement our existing environmental indicators monitoring program and allow the community to monitor our implementation of ESD from July 2000 onwards.
Progress towards this integration of ESD into planning, decision making and day-to-day operations is measured through the ESD indicators and reported in Sydney Water's Annual Reports.
