Environmental authorisation vs town planning approval: what's the difference

Town planning approval answers the question: may this land lawfully be used in this way? It is granted by the municipality under the Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act, 2013 (SPLUMA) and the municipal planning by-law, and it turns on the land use scheme, the spatial development framework, services capacity and the impact on neighbours.

Environmental authorisation answers a different question: may this activity lawfully be undertaken, given its environmental impact? It is granted by the competent environmental authority - usually the provincial environmental department, or the national department for certain activities - under the National Environmental Management Act, 1998 (NEMA) and its environmental impact assessment regulations.

Different legislation, different authority, different test, different specialists, different timelines. The two processes run separately, and neither one substitutes for the other.

Both involve public participation. Both involve specialist studies. Both produce a decision with conditions and both carry appeal rights. From the outside they look like versions of the same thing.

They also overlap in subject matter. A traffic study, a stormwater assessment or a heritage input may be relevant to both, and it is sensible to commission work that serves both processes. That overlap is exactly what creates the impression that satisfying one satisfies the other.

It does not. A rezoning approval says nothing about whether the activity may be undertaken environmentally, and an environmental authorisation says nothing about whether the land use is lawful.

Environmental authorisation is triggered by activity, not by zoning. NEMA's regulations list activities that may not commence without authorisation, and the trigger is typically the nature and scale of what is being done - clearing vegetation above a threshold, work in or near a watercourse, certain infrastructure, certain industrial processes, development above certain thresholds in sensitive areas.

Depending on the listed activity, the process is either a basic assessment or a full environmental impact assessment, with the full assessment being substantially longer and more involved.

The consequences of getting this wrong are more serious than on the planning side. Commencing a listed activity without authorisation is an offence under NEMA, and the remedies available to the authority go beyond an instruction to stop.

This matters most for industrial rezonings, larger residential and mixed-use developments, and anything on or near a watercourse, a wetland or an ecologically sensitive area - which is precisely the profile of projects where owners are most inclined to assume the rezoning covers everything.

In practice they should be run in parallel, with the specialist work coordinated so that a single traffic or hydrological study serves both files where that is appropriate. Running them sequentially adds many months for no benefit.

They do influence each other. A municipality assessing a rezoning will want to know the environmental position and may condition its approval on environmental authorisation being obtained. An environmental authority will want to understand the planning status. Inconsistency between what you have told the two authorities is a real risk when the documents are prepared by separate teams who are not talking.

Coordination is therefore not just efficient, it is protective. The planner and the environmental assessment practitioner should be working from the same project description, the same layout and the same numbers.

The planning application is prepared by a town planner, registered with SACPLAN. The environmental process is run by an environmental assessment practitioner, a distinct profession with its own registration framework. They are not interchangeable and neither can do the other's work.

The correct sequence at the outset is a screening exercise: establish both what planning approvals the project needs and whether any listed activity is triggered, before the programme and the budget are fixed. That screening is cheap. Discovering a listed activity after the planning approval has been granted is not.

Heritage is a further parallel track. Where the National Heritage Resources Act applies - older buildings, graves, certain sites and certain development thresholds - a heritage process runs alongside both of the others, again with its own authority and its own timeline.