A clear and present danger – How financial institutions and authorities have failed to address the human impacts of resettlement in Serbia’s lignite mining fields

Study    |    25 September 2015

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This study shows how the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has failed to enforce several of its basic principles on involuntary resettlement in the Kolubara Mining Basin, one of the largest sources of lignite in Europe, where mining has continued for over fifty years.

Effectively, the EBRD’s investment in Kolubara did little more than improve mechanisation at the mining site, and actually increased the amount of lignite extracted. As a consequence, several hundred families living within the mine “footprint”, already suffering from ill health and environmental deterioration caused by mining, found themselves “between a rock and a hard place”.