Researching and overseeing environmental legislation to ensure the well-being of communities from protected areas. NHC Project
NHC Project: Researching and overseeing environmental legislation to ensure the well-being of communities from protected areas
January 2024 – December 2024
Sub-granting project within the scope of the EU-funded project: ‘Catalyst of Change: Protecting the Union values by supporting a resilient, engaged and vocal civil society for the promotion of women’s rights, environmental justice and anti-corruption in Eastern and Southern Europe.’
After Romania joined the EU, the state had to implement a large spectrum of environmental policies. It also designated Natura 2000 protected areas on more than 20% of its territory. Together with other types of protected areas, the percentage covers today more than 26% of the country, including a wide area of private properties. While this looks good on paper, the reality exhibits a series of complex problems.
The background: For over two decades, the state has not been able to manage properly and actively most of the protected areas. There was no real public budget allocation for the protected area system, except in 2016 when a protected area agency was established – but severely underfunded. Even with an “acting” agency most of the protected areas exist only on paper (except for National and Natural parks which have minimal management ensured by the Autonomous Administration of Forests). To make things even worse, civil society organisations have been excluded from the protected area administration process and a lot of secondary legal initiatives worsen the overall situation: heavy bureaucracy and increasing restrictions on accessing funding, render NGO’s less and less able to fight illegalities.
The problem: Despite the significant contribution of protected areas to an improved quality of life, the absence of proper administration often results in communities residing within these areas being disproportionately affected by restrictions. Such regulations imply: limited or no forestry activities on private properties, limited or no agricultural activities, limited or no construction and development activities, large carnivore and other species protection (but without effective management for human-wildlife conflicts). As such, communities (mostly rural) from protected areas, having no real support and financial or other forms of compensations, struggle to develop and rarely benefit from the protected ecosystem services. Moreover, powerful companies have the resources to order environmental impact assessments for their projects, and often succeed in overriding protected area restrictions. Communities rarely benefit from such projects and are almost never involved in real democratic participatory and decision making processes.
The impact: Environmental injustice for communities; they do not benefit from the protected areas’ potential services and are constantly affected by restrictions, without compensation measures, while communities from outside protected areas have more freedom to develop and benefit from natural resources. Communities also grow a lack of acceptance for conservation, protected areas and environmental NGOs.
The project will design, implement and test a specific watchdog, research, monitoring and advocacy mechanism in order to address the described problem. It is also intended to ensure the continuity of our current projects and activities in the environmental justice domain.
We expect the following outcomes:
- Improving specific technical knowledge within the organization. We aim to realize a collection of relevant data regarding legal, financial and technical aspects covering protected area governance, restrictions and compensatory solutions in protected areas.
- Interpreting knowledge. We plan to design a modern and creative pilot database in order to rapidly synthesize and publish complex social-environmental information, that can be easily interpreted by non-professionals. Within this outcome we also plan to test and analyse several technical data interpretation methods, for advocacy and communication purposes.
- Analyse data, problems and possible solutions. We will study within specialised workgroups the collected data, current problems, practices, possible solutions and other good practices regarding the improvement of community acceptance of conservation regulations, with respect to environmental justice.
- Update our advocacy strategy. We aim to develop our current advocacy strategy, with a new chapter dedicated to environmental justice and communities affected by unmanaged or improperly managed protected areas.
- Propose solutions. We will forward a first-stage formal proposal towards authorities and key stakeholders, with the result of our analysis together with a set of legal solutions.
