LKE towards TOP-5, page-13751

Just because a project impacts on subterranean fauna, doesn't mean that no mining project is allowed to proceed. If that were true, no mining project would ever be able to get the green tick because flora and fauna exist in every square cm on earth.

The whole purpose of a company completing an environmental impact assessment is to study the environment in which a project is planned to be located, to feed in what the company proposes to build or construct and then to work out what the likely impacts will be

If you determine through your impact assessment that you are going to impact upon 112 different fauna species, but none of them are critically endangered and the project going ahead will not further threaten the long term viability of that species, then you will likely gain approval

If the baseline studies identify a species that only occurs in 1 other known location on earth and is not known to occur anywhere else, if your project is going to wipe out 60% of its known habitat, then your project will not be approved

This is really bread and butter Environmental Impact Assessment stuff.

Building and Development always impacts the environment in some way shape or form, the whole purpose of an EIA is to determine if the particular development is tolerable and wont wipe out or cause extinction to anything of significance, hence why approvals take a very long time