A new digital public participation platform, Echo, has just been launched and aims to make public participation (PP) in the environmental impact assessment (EIA) process more accessible, streamlined, and transparent.
Given the complexities of public participation, Echo will bridge the gap between environmental practitioners and the public. Launched on Wednesday, 05 January 2025, the platform is accessible to the public and environmental consultancies.
“Having worked with many environmental consultancies in the past to manage the public participation process and observing ongoing public frustrations with accessing information in many different places, Echo has been designed to be an all-in-one public participation platform that bridges the gap between citizens and environmental assessment practitioners (EAPs),” says Chris Bischoff, director of Echo. “Information is often presented in a fragmented way, public meetings are sometimes not accessible to all, there can be language barriers, and specialist environmental studies can be difficult to understand – these are some of the challenges that citizens experience when trying to engage in a public participation process with an EIA. “Echo directly addresses these challenges through a number of digital features that enable information sharing and accessibility. It’s also designed to make public participation more streamlined for the EAP managing the overall EIA.” Echo offers environmental consultancies an intuitive, feature-rich platform to make the management of a public participation process much easier. Some of the features include dynamic EIA project pages, proximity maps, auto-translate modules, summary sections, built-in forms to collect public comments, and an easy account management system.For the public, Echo offers a user-friendly online space where citizens can explore active EIAs and other environmental authorisation projects, find public EIA pages with information presented in a digestible manner, and easily register as an Interested and Affected Party (I&AP) to provide a comment.
“We essentially built this platform to create an online community that facilitates more interaction between citizens and environmental assessment practitioners,” says Bischoff.“We highly recommend local environmental consultancies sign up on the platform to list their EIA projects. We also encourage citizens to use Echo to get the information they need to meaningfully engage in a public participation process.” To explore Echo and to sign up, visit https://echohub.co.za/
