Buk Bijela dam and the Upper Drina cascade

Illegal prolongation of the permit

An environmental permit ceases to be valid if the facility does not operate for a period of longer than four years. This means the Ministry should have initiated a process for cancelling the permit instead of extending it, in contravention of the law.

Lack of new public consultation and inadequate previous one

No new public consultation was held, as this is not required under the Republika Srpska Regulation on the procedure for revising and renewing environmental permits. However, as we saw above, this was not the correct procedure for this occasion, as the whole environmental impact assessment procedure should have been repeated.

Instead, Article 39 of the Law on Environmental Protection should have been applied, especially as the previous consultation was deficient.

The public consultation in 2012 was not held in line with Republika Srpska’s Law on Environmental Protection or the Aarhus Convention, to which Bosnia-Herzegovina is a party. No information about the public consultation was published on the website of the Ministry, nor was the draft environmental impact assessment study published, which is in violation with the Convention. Due to this, the interested public only got to know of the consultation at a late stage, which impacted on their ability to deliver good quality comments or indeed to comment at all.

Lack of new transboundary consultation and inadequate previous one

Given that the Buk Bijela hydropower plant, if built, will also impact on Montenegro, especially the protected river Tara, the Espoo Convention requires transboundary public consultation.

The 2012 environmental impact assessment study did not adequately examine the transboundary impacts of Buk Bijela on Montenegro, and unilaterally, without any evidence, concluded that there would be no transboundary impact.

The normal level of the Buk Bijela reservoir would be 434 metres above sea level. However the border between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro is at about 432.37 metres above sea level as measured at the point where the river touches the land. So it is clear that the reservoir would at least sometimes extend into Montenegro.

In addition, whether the reservoir is physically in Montenegro or not, other impacts such as on fish migration will certainly exist.

The study did not look into the cumulative impacts of several hydropower plants in a relatively small area, nor seismological risk, impact on underground water, cave systems and biodiversity in Montenegro, nor the risk of landslides, how sediment transport will be affected, potential accidents and floods.

Although the interested public in Montenegro submitted critical comments in 2012 and 2013, the Republika Srpska Ministry does not appear to have taken them into account, and did not respond to them in the decision to issue an environmental permit.