Report Environmental Incidents

The Defence Environment and Heritage Manual sets out Defence’s commitment to the continual improvement of its environmental performance. Effective Incident Management is required to successfully determine the need for corrective actions, identify trends and improve environmental performance in order to support the long-term sustainability of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) capability and the Defence estate.
Environmental incidents are reported using the GEMS Estate Incident process through two main pathways.

1. If you do not have access to GEMS, please complete the GEMS Incident form.
2. If you have access to the GEMS incident module, incidents can be directly entered into GEMS using the Incident Notification and Recording reference guide.

Please note: The form must be submitted from within the DPE. If you do not have a Defence or CIOG approved email address you will not be able to successfully submit an Estate Incident Report Form. However, we encourage you to fill in the Report Form and email it to GEMS User Support (SEG Service Delivery EDSD User Support defenceeiggems.sustainment@defence.gov.au), or your Defence Point Of Contact (POC) if you have one.

The Defence Environmental Incident Reporting Guideline provides general guidance on the environmental incident management process and requirements. Any comments on the current Guideline can be forwarded to environmentandheritage@defence.gov.au.

Key notes and known issues:

Do not report safety incidents on GEMS. These continue to be reported through Sentinel. Only include estate elements on GEMS incident reports.

The GEMS incident report form includes five severity ratings, as well as “dangerous”. The consequence rating descriptions in the environment impact category of the E&IG risk management framework should be used to establish environmental incident severity.

Ensure that incidents are assigned to one or more incident categories so that proper reporting is available for releases and other classes of incident with specific data field requirements.

On submission of an incident all Base Managers within a Zone receive a notification of the incident. This will be changed soon to only include the relevant BM for the affected site.

There are several non-functioning elements of the form that are being rectified, including the “Extract incident data” button.