Environmental Management in Transit Turnkey Procurements

A discussion is presented of how environmental and community issues affect project planning and development, and ideas are presented on how to proactively manage the environmental compliance process to capitalize on the flexibility and advantages of a turnkey approach and at the same time reduce the potential for major project risk factors to jeopardize successful project implementation. On the basis of the experience of traditional and turnkey projects during the project development process, major project risk factors (cost, delay, and public relations risks), which need to be identified and acknowledged as early as possible in the project development process, are explored. Mechanisms to compensate for these risk factors need to be developed and incorporated into the design of the turnkey procurement process. Assigning responsibility for environmental management functions to the parties best equipped to resolve the issues likely to arise at each stage of the development process is also important. Whereas reactive environmental management exposes projects to high levels of risk and has the potential to jeopardize attainment of turnkey objectives, proactive environmental management has the potential to support the turnkey concept by reducing the risks associated with environmental issues.