Corridor Vc motorway, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Building the motorway on the currently planned route in the Neretva valley would impact the property and livelihoods of war returnees, including Serbs who are a minority in the area. As well as the stress caused to individual households who have rebuilt their lives there in the last two decades, this has resulted in concerns about divisive and politicised decisions that damage peacebuilding efforts and against the Dayton Peace Agreement. 

According to the EBRD’s safeguards policy, minorities should be treated as vulnerable groups that require additional safeguards and consultations. However, the 2020 environmental and social impact assessment fails to provide either detailed analysis or adequate mitigation measures. 

IPAM’s findings confirmed that the EBRD had breached its standards on vulnerable groups and that the Bank had ‘failed to internalise into its (…) decision-making process for this project, the relevance of the local social context. This has led to the acceptance of a decision that would disproportionately impact a vulnerable group and therefore exacerbate the local conflict.’

Moreover, affected landowners alleged that JP Autoceste employees have trespassed on their land, setting up markers for the motorway routing without even consulting them.

The rivers Buna and Bunica are what the EBRD’s environmental and social policy calls ‘critical habitats’, due to the presence of rare and endangered species such as stone crayfish, softmouthed trout and eels. In particular, the part of the Buna where the motorway bridge would cross the river is a key spawning spot for the globally endangered softmouthed trout, Salmo obtusirostris. 

The EBRD’s rules state that construction in a critical habitat is not allowed unless a number of criteria have been satisfied. The first condition is that there is no viable alternative. As explained above, this is not the case. The ridge route is viable, and the decision to abandon it has never been properly justified.

The EBRD is trying to bend its own rules by claiming that construction will not take place in a critical habitat as no construction will take place in the riverbed. But anyone who has ever been near a construction site in southeast Europe knows that there is zero chance of this being enforced. Whether it is planned or not, damage to the river bank during construction is inevitable, and noise and vibrations even more so.

One does not need to look far to find an example. At nearby Počitelj, a section of the Corridor Vc has already been built. Between August 2019 and January 2020, not only was a temporary bridge built over the Neretva, with all the noise and vibration this brings, but the northern riverbank was damaged, despite not being on the main construction site.

Numerous other deficiencies in the environmental assessment, including a lack of updated baseline data, lack of information on gravel extraction, and inaccessibility of much of the project area to field researchers, together with a reliance on unenforceable mitigation measures, mean that the impacts of the construction have almost certainly been underestimated.

This conclusion was also supported by IPAM, which found that ‘the assessment process has not fully identified and characterised the risks and impacts of the Project on biodiversity.’

A section of the Corridor Vc southwest of Sarajevo is planned to go through an 11 km tunnel through the Prenj mountain, a stunning and unspoilt area. For decades, a National Park has been planned there, but has so far not been established. 

While the tunnel would bypass some parts of the mountain, it would likely disrupt underground water flows and the approaches to the tunnel would seriously damage this wild landscape.

This will be the most costly section of an already very expensive project, and is also likely to become an environmental flashpoint, likely leading to further delays and cost increases.

Similarly to the section south of Mostar, the route across Prenj has been subject to route changes which were not consulted with the public during the spatial planning phase. And during the environmental impact assessment process in 2023, civil society organisations were once again presented with a fait accompli, as the Ministry responsible for the process refused to take any comments on the routing into account.