FeAST video and transcript

Video transcript

Welcome to a short introduction to the Feature Activity Sensitivity Tool or FeAST. Victoria's new first pass environmental risk assessment tool. The tool is intended for anyone who is planning to undertake works, develop, use or construct in the marine and coastal environment. There are over 130 different activities to choose from. These can include offshore wind developments, waste management activities or dredging.

The FeAST tool on CoastKit can help you to understand your project's potential environmental impact through identifying sensitive habitats and values within or near to the proposal. The tool allows users to select their activity in the area of interest to evaluate desktop based environmental information.

Using the information defined by the user, the tool produces a first pass environmental risk assessment report. This can be used to support marine and coastal consent applications and also develop further actions such as management plans or mitigation measures. The tool uses the best available data at hand to produce rapid results within 30 seconds.

The FeAST tool should be used prior to undertaking a full environmental impact assessment. It should be used in the first stages of a project and form the basis for any screening or scoping studies. Once the operation is completed, there will be an option to download the report which will create a PDF which can be viewed in the browser or on your desktop.

The report provides a summary of the proposed activities and location of the project. Giving details of the overall results showing the number of high and medium pressures across all the proposal activities, the number of habitat types and also the final FeAST score indicating the potential risk to habitats. The last pages show the proximity analysis results, which give an indication of any marine and coastal features within the area of the proposal.

For more information on the FeAST tool on CoastKit, we've produced guidelines that detail the assessment process, provide guidance on using the tool, and report outputs, as well as other supporting documentation. For any questions relating to CoastKit or FeAST, please e-mail us at Coastkit@delwp.vic.gov.au