Policy Brief: Strengthening Environmental Audit in Tanzania

 The National Environment Management Council (NEMC) promotes and enforce undertaking of self-environmental audits by regulated communities in order to ensure compliance with the environmental law. The environmental audit is done to assess the nature and extent of the risk from an industrial or any project activity on the environment or to human health. The audits are as well important in identifying and correcting environmental harms. The harm could be in the form of land or water contamination, air pollution or other kinds of pollution. 

The environmental audit assesses compliance of the facility with the environmental governing laws, thus recommends corrective measures to manage the negative impacts on the environment or human health. It also recommends measures for optimization of the usage of natural resources. In other words, environmental audits are considered to be a tool for achieving the goal of sustainable development. The audit conducted also involves comparing the impacts predicted during EIA studies with those that actually occur after implementation of the project.

Environmental audit, thus is an important exercise as it pushes industries to keep improving their environmental performance regularly. In order to ensure proper implementation of environmental audit, three mandatory prerequisites are required to be in place. Firstly, a strong law to provide legal binding, secondly, a guidance manual illustrating the steps to be performed and lastly, quality check procedure for audit reports to ensure impacts are properly identified and adequate measures are taken for their mitigation. 

The objective of this policy brief is to evaluate the existing system of environmental audit followed in Tanzania, understand the limitations and delve on strategies to strengthen it.

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