DUSHANBE, October 9, 2015, Asia-Plus – On Friday October 9, the Majlisi Namoyandagon (Tajikistan’s lower house of parliament) endorsed amendments proposed by the government to the law on licensing separate types of activity.

“Companies now must have license to conduct the environmental audit in the country,” Shams Nazarov, the deputy head of the Committee for Environmental Protection under the Government of Tajikistan. 

Environmental audit is a general term that can reflect various types of evaluations intended to identify environmental compliance and management system implementation gaps, along with related corrective actions.  There are generally two different types of environmental audits: compliance audits and management systems audits.  

The environmental compliances audits are intended to review the site''s/company''s legal compliance status in an operational context. Compliance audits generally begin with determining the applicable compliance requirements against which the operations will be assessed.  This tends to include national regulations, permits and local ordinances/codes.  In some cases, it may also include requirements within legal settlements.

Compliance audits may be multimedia or programmatic.  Multimedia audits involve identifying and auditing all environmental media (air, water, waste, etc.) that apply to the operation/company. Programmatic audits (which may also be called thematic or media-specific) are limited in scope to pre-identified regulatory areas, such as air.

Audits are also focused on operational aspects of a company/site, rather than the contamination status of the real property. Assessments, studies, etc. that involve property contamination/remediation are typically not considered an environmental audit.