IFC PS6 pre-screening before the critical-habitat assessment
IFC Performance Standard 6 requires a client whose project is located within a legally protected area or an internationally recognised area — natural World Heritage sites, Biosphere Reserves, Key Biodiversity Areas, protected wetlands — to demonstrate through an assessment that residual impacts will be mitigated. Before that assessment is commissioned, someone has to find out whether the site is in or near such an area at all. ERWAY Legality Assessment is that first desktop screen, per site polygon, with the record behind each finding.
The screen names the protected area and its protection class, the overlap in hectares, the relation to any heritage site or protected wetland with the footprint's confidence, the tenure status where the site lies on Indigenous or community land, and the threatened species recorded inside and within a kilometre. Key Biodiversity Areas are not in the product, and the critical-habitat determination that PS6 paragraph 16 asks for is a specialist's work; this is stated clearly. The Equator Principles page shows where this screen sits in a lender's process.
What PS6 asks
Paragraph 20 of the Performance Standard: where a proposed project is located within a legally protected area or an internationally recognised area, the client meets the requirements of paragraphs 13 to 19 as applicable, and demonstrates that the project's significant residual impacts on biodiversity will be adequately mitigated. The legally protected areas are those meeting the international definition of a protected area, including areas proposed for designation; the internationally recognised areas include natural World Heritage sites, biosphere reserves, Key Biodiversity Areas and protected wetlands.
What the pre-screen answers
For each candidate site, whether any of those designations is present, at what distance or overlap, and with what certainty. A site 3 km from a Biosphere Reserve's buffer zone and a site inside a wetland boundary are different conversations with the lender, and the screen tells them apart before anyone visits either site. The threatened-species panel frames the critical-habitat question without claiming to answer it.
What remains
The critical-habitat assessment, the field baseline, the biodiversity management plan and the offset design where one is needed. The screen tells the sponsor and the lender which sites need that work and hands the specialist a dated file with the findings, the map and the geometry — which is the hand-over the consultancy would otherwise have to build itself.