Environmental regulation building on success
The Environmental Regulation Division has released its Compliance Plan 2025-26 and Compliance Report Card 2024-25, reflecting a shared commitment to advancing regulatory excellence.
The compliance plan sets out our compliance focus for the coming year, detailing how we will target resources to areas posing the greatest environmental risk. By concentrating on these priorities, we maintain a proactive, risk-based regulatory approach that supports environmental protection and provides clear guidance for the regulated community.
The compliance plan identifies several key focus areas for the next financial year, including:
- inspections and audits of onshore petroleum and hydrocarbon facilities, and mines that discharge wastewater
- inspections of waste management facilities, sewage facilities, waste transporters
- licence reviews for hydrocarbon and aquaculture facilities.
For the first time, our compliance plan includes ongoing regulatory priorities alongside the 2024–2025 focus areas.
These priorities reflect key areas of sustained attention and include:
- groundwater quality management and compliance monitoring of onshore petroleum activities
- illegal waste dumping
- air quality monitoring in the Darwin airshed, which include Palmerston and surrounding rural areas.
The report card provides a comprehensive review of last year’s activities, showcasing inspections, reviews, and enforcement actions. It offers the public a transparent view of our performance, with findings directly informing the new compliance plan.
Highlights from the report card include:
- 540 pollution reports addressed
- more than 100 site inspections, with 100% coverage of high-risk sites
- compliance monitoring across 250 licences
- 26 warning letters and 13 environmental audit notices issued
- 8 infringement notices and 18 pollution abatement notices administered
- one ongoing prosecution and one suspended licence
- one direction issued under the Petroleum Act 1984 and 5 under the Waste Management and Pollution Control Act 1998
- 2 regulatory statements issued.
The report card is a vital tool for tracking compliance and enforcement actions and measuring progress towards improved compliance.
To find out more about the compliance plan and report card, go to the NTEPA website.
Our compliance and enforcement activities are underpinned by robust environmental assessment and approval processes.
For more detail on how these functions work together to deliver strong environmental outcomes, read the department’s recent Performance Report: Assessment and Approvals Reporting 2024-2025 PDF (6.4 MB).
