Authorities must take action and stop the planned construction of numerous small hydropower plants and pressure from local communities is key for efforts to achieve this and protect Bosnia’s rivers, environmental NGOs told N1 on Sunday.
The fate of Bosnia’s rivers has been in the spotlight in recent days after numerous global environmental organisations and environmentalists, including Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio, called on the government of Bosnia’s Federation (FBiH) entity to ban the construction of small hydropower plants.
RELATED NEWS
“Leading conservation organizations around the world are urgently calling on the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina to turn a breakthrough resolution banning new small hydropower plants into law. The resolution, which holds no legal power yet, was initially passed June 23, but the deadline to implement the resolution and permanently ban new small hydropower plants is Wednesday, Sept. 23. If the government fails to turn the resolution into law in the near future, they will again be putting at grave risk thousands of kilometres of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s wild rivers and the people and wildlife that depend on the waterways,” a statement recently published on the website of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said.
DiCaprio joined the campaign and several days later also urged the FBiH government to protect local rivers in posts on social media.
He also quoted FBiH Prime Minister, Fadil Novalic, who expressed support for the activists and locals fighting to protect rivers from hydropower plants.
“I didn’t think that that large world even looks at what our small one is doing. The statement I made represents my personal opinion,” Novalic said.
“The damage created (with the contruction of small hydropower plants) is great while the benefit is minor, private,” he said.
This is also the stance of local environmental NGOs that have been fighting to protect rivers.
“With corruption and the problems that accompany environmental industry in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we have reached a level where the construction of small hydropower plants is in the interest of individuals, not society, and represents great damage and danger to the local community and the environment in which we live,” said Bosko Nikolic, from the NGO ‘Eco Leonardo’.
“About 50 percent of citizens in the entire territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina is not even connected to the water supply system, so this is nonsense,” said Alma Midzic, from the NGO ‘Crvena’.
Pressure from local communities is key to protecting rivers, the NGO representatives said.
The issue is within the competencies of the FBiH agencies tasked with taking care watercourses leading to the Adriatic Sea and the Sava river of the ‘first category’ but more than 90 percent of the planned mini-hydro power plants are on the watercourses of the ‘second category’, which are under the jurisdiction of institutions at lower levels of government.
According to Sejad Delic, the Director of The Sava River Watershed Agency, the issue is a result of “failure to respect the environmentally acceptable flow in the construction of small hydropower plants in a row,” which is “cumulatively disastrous for the entire watercourse.”
According to Damir Mrdjen, the director of the Adriatic Sea River Basin District Agency, the key sector which should take the issue into account is spatial planning.
“If the strategic estimate of the influence on the environment is not adequately conducted, then we get into this situation,” he said.
