Buk Bijela dam and the Upper Drina cascade - Bankwatch (original) (raw)

Environmental impact assessments were carried out for the Buk Bijela and Foča plants between 2011 and 2013, so are heavily outdated by now. They were also of extremely poor quality, failing to specify exactly which species are present at the site, using old hydrological data, failing to assess the cumulative impacts of the three dam projects, and claiming that Buk Bijela would not affect Montenegro without offering any evidence.

Yet the Republika Srpska authorities have not required updates to the studies. Partly as a result of this, the environmental permits for the Buk Bijela and Foča projects are subject to legal disputes on several levels.

In June 2018, the Aarhus Resource Centre from Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, submitted complaints to the Banja Luka District Court against the extension of the environmental permits for Buk Bijela and Foča hydropower plants.

The court agreed in May 2019 that the request to extend the Buk Bijela permit had been submitted after the legally stipulated deadline and cancelled the permit, but in the case of Foča in November 2019, it came to the opposite conclusion, which is now being challenged at the Constitutional Court.

In December 2019 a new environmental permit was issued for Buk Bijela, however, no new environmental impact assessment was carried out, despite a request from Montenegro. The decision not to require a new environmental assessment is being challenged in court by the Aarhus Centre in Bosnia and Herzegovina and as of March 2022 the Republika Srpska Supreme Court is examining the case.

In June 2021 several NGOs submitted a complaint to the Energy Community Secretariat due to the Republika Srpska authorities’ failure to require new environmental assessments for the projects and due to the fact that the existing ones are not in line with the EU Environmental Assessment Directive. The complaint is under examination but has received a boost from a World Bank report which finds a number of deficiencies in the environmental impact assessments.