Construction Environment Management Plan

Almost every significant construction project is now consented on the condition that the contractor produces, and works to, a Construction Environment Management Plan. The CEMP is the document that turns the promises made in an environmental impact assessment, a planning permission and a contract into instructions a site team can actually follow: who does what, to what standard, monitored how, and evidenced where. Where it is written well it prevents pollution incidents, protects programme and keeps the regulator away from the gate. Where it is copied from the last job it becomes a shelf document that satisfies nobody and protects no one.

This course takes you through the whole document and the whole project life cycle. It begins with the purpose and structure of a CEMP and the legal and permitting framework it sits inside, then works through the link to environmental impact assessment, stakeholder engagement, objectives and targets, and the environmental management system that keeps the plan alive. It then covers the technical control areas in the order a site meets them: resource and materials management, waste, biodiversity, air quality and dust, water quality and drainage, noise and vibration, soil and contaminated land, and emergency preparedness. It closes with monitoring, reporting, auditing, review and project close-out.

Throughout, the emphasis is practical. You will work with control tables, significance matrices, inspection regimes, register formats and site examples that can be lifted straight into your own plan, and you will learn how to tell a CEMP that will survive an audit from one that will not.

What you will learn

• Explain what a CEMP is, what it must contain and how it relates to the environmental statement, the planning conditions and the contract
• Build and maintain a legal and other requirements register, and identify the permits, licences and consents a project needs and when to apply for them
• Use the environmental impact assessment process to identify aspects, assess significance and select proportionate mitigation using the mitigation hierarchy
• Plan and run stakeholder engagement, including complaints and grievance handling, for a project working next to occupied neighbours
• Set measurable environmental objectives, targets and key performance indicators, and normalise them so that performance can be compared between periods and projects
• Design site controls for resources, waste, biodiversity, air, water, noise, vibration, soil and contaminated land
• Prepare emergency response arrangements and test them, and respond correctly to a spill or an ecological incident
• Establish monitoring, reporting, internal auditing, management review and environmental close-out for a completed project

Who it is for

The course is written for site and project managers, environmental advisers and coordinators, HSE and SHEQ practitioners, planning and consents officers, design and engineering staff who write mitigation into specifications, and client-side or consultant staff who review and approve contractors CEMPs. No formal prerequisite is required, although a working familiarity with construction sequencing will help you get the most from the site examples.

How the course works

The programme is delivered entirely online and is self-paced, so you can work through the modules in whatever pattern suits your project commitments and return to any lesson as often as you need. It concludes with a 30-question final exam with a pass mark of 70 per cent. Successful learners receive a verifiable SKEDMIA certificate. Allow approximately eight hours of study in total.