How Aurecon Air® is Empowering Communities and Delivering Sustainable Outcomes

Over recent years, the information required to address environmental statutory requirements has been growing in complexity. As a result, environmental reporting has become increasingly challenging to manage, with traditional reports, often delivered as large PDFs, maps, and images, making it difficult for decision makers and community members to understand. With varying stakeholder priorities and perspectives, project trajectory can be greatly influenced. As a result, the delivery and approval times for major infrastructure projects are increasing, while the public is finding it harder to grasp the potential impacts on their communities.

Aurecon air transforms lengthy environmental reports into an engaging digital format, featuring interactive maps, videos, images, audio, and 3D scenes. The platform resulted from a partnership between Aurecon’s Creative Technology division and Environment and Planning business. Environment and Planning delivered a pilot digital environment report for two major transport authorities in Victoria, Australia before expanding to a productised solution. Aurecon’s iterative design methodology allowed our development team to collaborate with subject-matter-experts. Key milestones in the design process focused on differentiating features such as text-to-map capability to visualise data, document revisioning and ensuring full mobile accessibility to maximise community engagement.

Client feedback indicates that the impact has been significant in making complex project information far simpler for stakeholders and the community to engage with and understand. This has resulted in reduced community feedback submissions, demonstrating improved understanding through access to information. Clients have described community members bringing their mobile phones with the report loaded to community engagement meetings to discuss project information, a clear sign that it is democratising access to information. We are also seeing it streamline approvals processes through transparency and access for government agencies. This de-risks projects and maintains project expectations and schedules for critical infrastructure projects.

Aurecon air provides project personnel, government and communities with clear, fast, and simple ways to understand the environmental setting, using 2, 3 and 4D interactive maps, visualisations, videos, images, audio, and other multi-media content. The interactive data, with the ability to zoom, pan, and select, enables better transparency of information. The data shows before and after landscape changes, and how and where environmental impacts were avoided, minimised or managed. Mapping is linked to the report, updating as the reader scrolls, with hyperlinked text highlighting the corresponding data evidence. Easy editing and version control across text and mapping also supports collaboration and reviews. With Generative AI offering drafted chapter summaries, time savings are applied to deeper investigations and better project outcomes. Developed with a holistic project lens, multi-disciplinary reports are delivered digitally throughout the project lifecycle from site selection, environmental impact assessments and planning approvals into construction, management and decommission planning. Technical components are combined into a single interface, enabling greater understanding between project stakeholders, who previously suffered information loss or misinterpretation in data handovers between critical stages. Data visualisation strengthens collaboration between infrastructure design and environmental assessment, and we’re seeing this realised through more environmentally sustainable outcomes.