Sarah Schiess is a Senior Consultant and team leader based in Wellington, New Zealand with 30 years of professional experience focused in the areas of groundwater hydrology and contaminated land investigation and remediation. Sarah has lived and worked in the United States, New Zealand, and Australia.

Sarah is a specialist in the management of environmental liability as it relates to large portfolios of sites. She is also a specialist in quantitative hydrogeologic assessments with extensive experience in a wide range of environmental projects.

Sarah has worked as both a consultant and within industry as an Environmental Manager for a multinational oil company. In her role as Environmental Manager, she was responsible for development and evaluation of lifecycle strategies for a large portfolio of contaminated sites in order to minimize liabilities while meeting all regulatory requirements in a timely, cost effective manner. This required extensive stakeholder engagement (with the business, lawyers, government departments and regulators such as Ministry for Environment and Regional Council officers and councilors, land owners and occupiers, and the public) as well as a strong technical understanding of the all aspects of the sites’ conditions.

As an environmental consultant, Sarah has developed Conceptual Site Models for a number of complex contaminant and hydrogeologic conditions through the use of innovative field techniques and data evaluation tools. This has allowed the regulatory close out of a number of sites which were previously problematic and costly to the client.