Environmental Leadership. Built on Every Side of the Table.
Seran is an independent environmental consultancy led by Hilary Chapman. She has worked on the contractor, government, and independent auditor sides of Australia's most complex infrastructure, bringing a perspective that most practices simply cannot replicate.
How Seran came to be.
Hilary's career began in London with Coopers & Lybrand, later PricewaterhouseCoopers, before she moved to Australia and became Group Environmental Manager at Thiess, one of the country's largest civil construction companies. Inside a major contractor, she saw the same problem repeatedly: the gap between what environmental frameworks required and what delivery teams could actually sustain under schedule pressure.
In 2005 she went independent to bridge that gap directly, providing senior, embedded environmental leadership that large consultancies charge a premium for but rarely deliver. Seran Pty Ltd was incorporated in 2011.
Hilary Chapman
Three short reads on what Hilary brings to a project, the projects she has worked on, the perspective she has earned, and the services Seran delivers.
Some of Australia's most significant infrastructure.
West Gate Tunnel. Victorian Desalination Project. Snowy 2.0. WestConnex. Star of the South. EastLink. AirportLink. Peninsula Link. Channel Deepening Project.
Every side of the table.
She has worked embedded in contractor teams, advised government project authorities, and operated as an independent auditor. Very few practitioners have all three.
Three service areas.
Environmental approvals strategy and impact assessment. Environmental management systems and ISO 14001 frameworks. Independent environmental advice, review, and facilitation.
What distinguishes Hilary's approach is the range of perspective she brings to every engagement, the contractor's delivery pressures, the regulator's evidence requirements, the auditor's independence. Her project experience spans roads, rail, tunnels, water, energy, and remediation, and the ability to apply existing regulatory frameworks intelligently across unfamiliar territory. In complex environments, that breadth is what makes the difference.
A foundation built across science, law, business, and governance.
Four principles that shape every engagement.
Direct accountability, not delegation.
When you engage Seran, you work with Hilary Chapman. The person who understands your project is the person doing the work.
Honest about risk, before it's a problem.
Hilary identifies early signals, a community concern that could escalate, a timeline that hasn't accounted for a regulatory step, and gives the project team a direct assessment before it becomes a crisis. Large consultancies find this hardest to replicate.
Environment as a delivery enabler.
Well-designed environmental strategy creates conditions for a project to proceed, not barriers to it. Every engagement starts from the delivery outcome: what does the project need, and how does the environmental program get it there?
Precision over volume.
Every document is calibrated to what the reader actually needs, regulator, community, project team. Clear, coherent, built to hold up under scrutiny.
Let's talk about your project.
A short conversation is usually enough to understand where we can help.