Environmental Issues
by D'vora Ben-Shaul
Ask any environmentally aware
and informed person what are Israel's critically important environmental
issues and they will no doubt all come
up with more or less the same list. But if
you ask them to arrange the issues in order
of priority you will probably get as many
opinions as you have participants. This is
not unexpected because not only is Israel's
list of environmental problems large, but
there are so many factors to be considered
that priorities are, to a great extent, in
the eye of the beholder and depend on the
particular area with which they are in personal
contact. Therefore I have listed the topics
here alphabetically and not according to any
particular priority; they are simply the issues
at stake.
- Introduction
- Air Pollution
- Nature Protection
- Noise Abatement
- Pesticides
- Sea & Seacoast
- Sewage
- Solid Waste
- Surface Water Pollution
- Toxic Waste
- Urban Sprawl
- Water
Introduction
For the first three or four decades of its
existence, Israel was overwhelmingly concerned
with the development of the emergent state,
and quite understandably, national security,
infrastructure and economic development took
precedence over all other considerations.
As a result, very little attention was paid
to the changes that were taking place in the
environment as a result of all this activity.
Real attention to environmental concerns has
really only began to come about during the
last 25 years or so, slowly gaining more and
more attention but even so, still low enough
in the list of national priorities that it
was only in the last elections that concern
for the environment formed a part of the platform
of any party running for national election.
Even so, the Ministry for the Environment
remains one of the least sought posts in the
cabinet, and it is usually reserved as a reward
for some party stalwart to whom the prime
minister owes a post.
This does not mean that
some real advances were not made in the intervening
years and among them one must cite the outstanding
success of the Society for the Protection
of Nature in Israel (SPNI), a non-governmental
organization, whose lobbying and insistence
in the 1950s, convinced a reluctant government
to set aside an area, albeit a small one of
the Lake
Hula wetlands that were being drained,
as a permanent nature reserve - Israel's first.
This organization also, through their sterling
efforts in schools, succeeded in educating
the public not to pick wildflowers. It was
also their consistent pressure on succeeding
governments that led to the creation of The
Israel Nature Reserves Authority (NRA). One
cannot fail to be aware of the excellent work
of the NRA in protecting wildlife and in saving
several species from the brink of extinction.
It was due to the untiring efforts of the
NRA's first director, the late Major-General
Avraham Yaffe that Israel ranks among the
top ten nations in the world in the percentage
of national land set aside as nature reserves.
It was the NRA that set up the country's
first environmental protection unit, preceding
the formation of the Environmental Protection
Service by several years. The unit concentrated
its efforts on the protection of water sources
and on the prevention of pesticide abuse and
in the early 1970s, found itself in the unusual
position of being both censured and commended
by the State Comptroller in the same report.
The NRA was criticised for having exceeded
its legal mandate in dealing with issues that
were not confined to the issue of nature reserves,
but was then commended for having done so
because these vital issues were not being
addressed by any other body. One of the results
of this activity was the emergence of an agriculture
ministry "think tank" in 1970 where
experts from a number of disciplines studied
ways of protecting the Sea of Galilee (the
Kinneret), Israel's largest surface water
source. The outgrowth of this group was the
appointment of the Kinneret Management Committee
which still protects the lake from pollutants
and misuse.
But there are still a number of serious problems
which need to be addressed and there is little
time left in which to devote the required
attention to them. Among them are:
Air Pollution
It is in combating air pollution
that some of the greatest advances have been
made, notably in Haifa where for years the population suffered from
the pollution emissions of the local oil refinery
and the Israel Electric Company plant, not
to mention the large complexes devoted to
chemical production such as Haifa Chemicals.
By the end of the 1980s, Haifa was suffering
sulphur dioxide (SO2) levels more than four
times higher than the standard allowable.
Stringent emission permits issued in response
to publicly-sponsored litigation have now
brought about a situation in which there is
rarely an occasion when these emissions exceed
the permitted level. This is also true of
other heavily industrialized areas such as Ashdod,
where for two decades, emission of SO2 was
so high as to pose a danger to public health
and where the percentage of children and the
elderly suffering from respiratory complications
was the highest in Israel.
Unfortunately these gains must be measured
against the rapid deterioration of air quality
in other areas. While the noted Israeli songwriter,
Naomi Shemer in her memorable "Jerusalem
of Gold" in 1967 sang of "mountain
air as pure as wine," today Jerusalem's
air pollution is at such a level that it is
predicted that by the year 2010, air pollution,
if unchecked, will reach the levels prevailing
today in Mexico City.
In Jerusalem,
it is not industrial but vehicular pollution
that is responsible for the degradation of
air quality. Rapid growth after the Six-Day
War of 1967 brought hundreds of thousands
of new residents to the city and houses, shopping
malls, roads and streets have multiplied accordingly.
Nothing has been done to lighten this polluting
factor.
Succeeding Israeli governments, for their
own reasons, have always favoured private
vehicles over an efficient public transport
system, some say because of the enormous taxes
and fees private vehicle owners pay. As a
result the capital city suffers, not only
from its own congested vehicular traffic,
but from the clouds of vehicle-generated pollution
that drift up from Tel Aviv and the entire,
highly-populated surrounding region.
Even when the government finally yielded
to the demands of the Environment Ministry
and the non-governmental environment groups,
and made lead-free gasoline available throughout
the country, no one, not the ministry of health,
not the transport ministry and not the ministry
of environment has actually made the effort
to educate the public to prefer unleaded fuel
for their cars.
No engineering information has been distributed
to garages, no publicity has been carried
out among the public. As a result, although
most vehicles in Israel can effectively use
unleaded petrol, they are often told by uninformed
mechanics that it might be dangerous to do
so.
The World Health Organization (WHO) released a study in April 2015 detailing how air pollution negatively impacts the everyday lives of people around the world. Globally, 482,000 premature deaths can be attributed to air pollution every year, according to the report. The estimated cost of damage caused by air pollution tops $1.6 trillion annually. In Israel, approximately 2,500 premature deaths yearly can be attributed to air pollution, with damage totalling 3.3 percent of GDP.
Nature
Protection and Wildlife Management
Israel has a number of nature and wildlife
protection problems that are unique. Because
of stringent hunting laws and very active
protection of wildlife, Israel has become
a refuge for many native animals in an area
where there is little protection offered.
Except for Jordan, none of the surrounding
Arab states have a really effective nature
protection service and many indigenous animals
such as gazelles, ibex, hyaenas and others
are now very rare in those countries. How
then, does one decide on the amount of protection
to be offered an animal such as the hill gazelle,
when its population reaches nuisance proportions
and it becomes an active threat to agriculture
in Israel, while a few kilometres across the
border, gazelles have been hunted almost to
extinction.
In addition, Israel is the temporary abode
and therefore de facto guardian of more than
three-quarters of Europe's migratory birds,
which stop over here on their way south in
the autumn and on their return to Europe in
the spring. Sometimes, as in the case of pelicans,
cormorants and starlings, the damage to field
crops and aquaculture can run into millions
of shekels. Israel must somehow strike a balance
between the need to protect the migrants against
the obvious agricultural needs.
Noise
Abatement
Israelis, by and large are a noisy lot. Like
all Mediterranean people they are convinced
that if you are not heard you don't exist.
Radios and stereos blare, cars honk incessantly
and the modulation of speech is a rarity.
Even so, another non-governmental organization,
The Israel Union for Environmental Defense
(IUED) has succeeded in obtaining court orders
to abate noise from various sources in residential
areas and it is to be hoped that more such
actions will be fortcoming.
Pesticides
Until June, 2001, there were at least a dozen
pesticides in use in Israel that are banned
in most western countries. Since Israel exports
a variety of fruits, vegetables and cheeses,
attempts are indeed made to keep pesticide
levels to a minimum, since the growers and
producers know that food exceeding the stringent
European standards will be returned. This
in some way does protect Israeli consumers
from excessive pesticide residues in food,
but not in all cases. Whenever foodstuffs
are returned for this reason they are usually
diverted to the Israeli market because of
the less stringent standards and because there
is no adequate monitoring system in effect.
Although both the ministries of health and
agriculture are supposed to monitor food quality,
both adamantly refuse to release their findings
to the public, maintaining that "this
would confuse people." This paternalistic
attitude, however, is becoming less felt since
the passage of the Freedom of Information
Act in 1998 by the Knesset.
Private studies, some of them carried out
by the ministry of the environment and some
by NGOs, have shown that about 12 percent
of the vegetables and fruits that reach the
market exceed even the liberal Israeli standards
for pesticide residue and in a large number
of cases, the pesticides were officially licensed
only for use on non-food crops such as cotton.
Because both the responsible ministries have
shown that they cannot be relied upon for
adequate monitoring of food products, there
is an increasingly vociferous demand for an
independent food administration.
The Sea
and Seacoast
In the 20 years that have passed since Israel
signed the protocols of the Barcelona Convention
for the Protection of the Mediterranean, great
strides have been made in the prevention of
pollution from oil spills and today the dumping
of contaminated bilge water and the release
of oil in Israeli seas is the exception, and
a sharply punished exception at that. In consequence,
tar on the beaches has been reduced by more
than 200 percent.
But other pollutants are still being dumped
into the sea including sewage and polluted
water from chemical plants, and in some cases,
permitted dumping of chemical waste at sea.
Much still needs to be done since in Haifa
harbour, to site just one instance, mercury
and other toxic metal contaminants have rendered
the fish unsuitable for food.
As for the coast line itself, the picture
is even more depressing. Once a land of golden
Mediterranean beaches, today the proliferation
of marinas for pleasure vessels and the tendering
of beachfront sites to developers have reached
such a proportion that public beaches are
getting more and more scarce, and due to an
expanding population, ever more crowded and
even more polluted. In addition, the recent
craze for all-terrain vehicles has made visiting
some public beaches both dangerous and offensive.
The most active and by far most successful
opponent of the destruction of the coastal
area is the IUED. This organization has had
some major successes in court when petitioning
for stoppage of projects and demands for disclosure
of full environmental impact statements.
But the IUED stands alone and until now no
national level planning authority has intervened,
so that each municipality or local council
decides for itself how much land may be ceded
to private concerns and, how much seafront
for marinas. Since both bring in high revenues,
the decisions are usually budgetary and not
environmental.
Sewage
Most of the systems used in Israel for the
discharge of sewage effluents, the conduits,
the sedimentation and aeration ponds and the
sewage treatment plants are inadequate to
the demands placed on them today. Many are
old and in poor repair and even more were
never designed to cope with a population that
is increasing by approximately one million
per decade.
In addition, in many cases communities have
been developed without the proper infrastructure,
and it was only recently that one of the oldest
settlements in the Galilee was converted from
cesspits to a central sewage disposal system.
In most kibbutzim and moshavim there are no
treatment facilities beyond sedimentation
and aeration and in some places, notably Jewish
settlements and the Arab townships in Judea
and Samaria, the raw sewage simply flows into
the wadis.
All of this, poses a serious threat to Israel's
water supply. Not only does the effluent find
its way to rivers and wadis and eventually
to the Sea of Galilee in some cases, it also
percolates downwards and contaminates the
underground aquifers.
Dealing with all of this is a monumental
problem since only court orders seem to be
able to convince the heads of local and municipal
councils to invest their tax-gained income
in a sewage system rather than something more
glamorous such as a community centre or a
sports complex. The IUED, however, has been
singularly successful in bringing action and
in getting such court orders issued and, at
the same time, in many more cases, by using
persuasion to convince authorities.
Solid
Waste
Rather more than 95 percent of Israel's solid
waste is buried in landfills, burned in open-air
pits or left to rot in garbage dumps throughout
the country. This is in contrast with Switzerland
that buries only 12 percent of its garbage
or Japan that buries 19 percent. Recycling
in Israel is so minimal as to hardly deserve
mention. This is not due, as some imagine,
to a lack of public willingness to participate
in recycling; in fact, where pilot projects
have been instituted such as in Tivon and
Yavne, for instance, public participation
has been overwhelmingly successful, and a
new system for collecting plastic soft drink
bottles is increasingly effective in the major
towns.
The open garbage dumps create a variety of
environmental dangers. Aside from aesthetic
considerations, they contribute a large amount
of toxic and particulate matter to air pollution;
they comprise a health hazard due to breeding
flies, rats and mosquitoes and they contaminate
underground water supplies. When situated,
as was Hiriya, Tel Aviv's main dump until
two years ago, in too close proximity to a
major airport, millions of scavenging gulls,
ravens and other birds are a major threat
to aircraft and large sums have been spent
in attempts to keep the birds away from the
runways.
Despite all this, until heavy winter rains
caused the Hiriya garbage mountain on the
edge of Tel Aviv to collapse, completely blocking
the flow of the nearby Ayalon River, nothing
constructive was done to alleviate this condition.
The ministry of the interior which is responsible
for municipalities, refuses to assign any
realistic place to the problem in their priorities
and year after year, all attempts to introduce
serious steps to help solve the problem are
met with a solid wall of objections. The interior
ministry still insists that "recycling
has not yet been proven to be effective or
economically sound." By artificially
keeping haulage rates low through subsidies,
the ministry has created a situation in which
Israeli towns and cities pay only $7 per ton
for garbage disposal, approximately one tenth
of that paid in all other industrialized countries.
At these prices it is simply not worthwhile
to change the system.
Surface
Water Pollution
The serious nature of the
pollution of Israel's rivers was dramatically
highlighted four years ago when a footbridge
over the Yarkon river collapsed and a group
of Australian athletes competing in the Maccabi
Games were thrown into the polluted river
below. Several subsequently died, and others
were injured, not from the fall but from the
insidious poisoning from exposure to the toxic
waters of the chemically-polluted river.
Toxic
Waste
Toxic waste disposal in Israel has significantly
improved over the past few years but is still
a long way from satisfactory. From a situation
only some seven years ago when thousands of
tons of toxic waste produced by industry failed
to reach the country's toxic waste disposal
facility at Ramat Hovav in the Negev, today
virtually all industrial toxic waste is accounted
for.
But the toxic waste site itself is as big
a problem as the one it was designed to solve.
Twenty-five years worth of back-logged materials
are kept in often leaking containers at the
site and the poisonous materials that seep
into the soil are a threat to the Negev aquifer
and a potential health hazard to communities
kilometres away. At last, an incinerator capable
of handling toxic waste has been installed
but it is of a size that will require several
years, working at maximum capacity, to deal
with the back log, not to mention the hundreds
of tons that arrive every year. It is clear
that the facility's capacity must be enlarged.
At the same time, toxic waste from agriculture
and from households and small businesses has
hardly been addressed. Public-spirited citizens
sometimes collect used batteries that pollute
the groundwater with a variety of metals including
nickel, cadmium and lithium, but once they
have collected them, no one seems to be able
to organize any transport to the toxic waste
dump. Much needs be done to ensure that batteries,
paint, solvents, used motor oil and pesticide
containers and left-over pesticides also get
to a disposal facility. Even some kibbutzim
and moshavim still toss this material into
the nearest wadi.
Urban
Sprawl
In 1948, only three per cent of the land
in the country was under pavement or asphalt;
by 1992 the figure had grown to over 17 percent.
Even this figure does not seem large for a
state that has known such a drastic increase
in population and such rapid development,
except when one realizes that 95 per cent
of the total population of Israel lives north
of Beersheba. This means that almost all of
the paved and asphalted land is in less than
half the country.
Estimates by a study group from the Technion,
Haifa, indicate that if the current increase
in population continues at the present rate,
and if building policies and infrastructures
are not carefully tailored, by the year 2020,
Israel will have a population of between nine
and 12 million people and at least three million
vehicles. Approximately 60 percent of the
Galilee will be urbanized, paved or asphalted.
This does not include the coastal strip where
planners already speak of "Nashkelon,"
that is, one continuous urban belt from Nahariya
to Ashkelon.
Every year more and more farmland and natural
areas yield to added highways and additional
residential complexes. In addition, the recent
construction of large industrial centres in
the Galilee further encroaches on once natural
terrain. But in actual fact there simply is
no overall plan for Israel's future growth.
Water
Even though water comes last in this alphabetical list of environmental
concerns, it is probably the one single issue
that most people would give first place in
any list of priorities.
The quality of drinking water and sometimes
the strong taste of chlorine in most of Israel's
water, is unsatisfactory and is expected to
continue declining. This is the conclusion
of the ministry of the environment and is
borne out by the repeated occasions on which
the ministry of health is obliged to advise
residents in certain areas to boil their drinking
water, and by the rapid increase in the sale
of bottled mineral water, considered a rank
luxury only a few years ago.
Moreover, the quantity of water available
is one of Israel's greatest causes for concern
and major efforts have been expended in finding
ways to save water, particularly in agriculture.
Today Israel leads the world in the utilization
of "grey water," that is water recycled
from sanitary sewage.
All of this water is diverted to industry
and to agriculture where fresh water allotments
have been cut by as much as 40 percent without
a resulting decrease in crop yields. Israel
has also invented and markets an enormous
variety of water saving systems for agriculture,
including computer-controlled irrigation systems
that only turn on the water when the moisture
level at the roots of the plants indicates
the need. But in the meantime, agricultural
fertilizers have resulted in nitrate contamination
of many wells in the coastal region and over-pumping
from the aquifers is allowing salt water to
seep in from the sea, rendering the water
unsatisfactory for household and most industrial
use.
Israel currently faces the most serious water
crisis in its history. Several years of insufficient
rainfall and increased demands due to population
growth and expanding industry have led to
a situation where drastic measures to reduce
water consumption are necessary.
Israel has also ceded millions of cubic litres
annually as a part of the peace agreements
with Jordan and it is no secret that there
is just not enough water in the long run,
nor will there be unless other sources such
as desalination operated by cheap, sustainable
energy become available. For this reason,
large budgets are devoted to the development
of solar energy for desalination and recently
an agreement was reached with the World Bank
to fund an experimental power plant that derives
its energy from ocean waves.
In the private sector less attention is paid
to water conservation and it is only when
the level of the Sea of Galilee, Israel's
largest surface water source, begins to drop
below the danger point, and when people see
this on their television sets, that anyone
seems to be concerned. But vast efforts are
underway to find agricultural and industrial
uses for water that is too saline to be potable
and many other, smaller projects are devoted
to this.
Even though Israel got off to a slow start
in dealing with its environmental problems
and even though these problems are many and
complicated, even the environmentalists prefer
to see that the glass is still half full rather
than half empty and the public is becoming
more and more aware of the problems involved.
The Life and Environment umbrella organization
has more than a dozen member NGOs and the
list is still growing. This in itself holds
out the hope that as more and more Israelis
are becoming concerned over these issues,
and demand effective action, that successive
governments will face up to the challenge.
Sources: Israeli
Foreign Ministry - D'vora Ben-Shaul came to Israel
from the US in 1959. She is a biologist and
nature writer with a Ph.D. from the University
of Texas, and has spent many years studying
Israel's natural life. She writes extensively
on topics concerning nature, biology and the
environment.
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