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The Prevention of Environmental Hazards Bill—which we initiated after the 2017 ecological disaster in which the Ashalim stream’s waterbed was contaminated by an acid leak—has been signed into law. Endorsed by 33 Members of Knesset and passed without any opposition, the bill proposed that harm caused to protected environmental assets, as well to protected areas, be defined as “environmental damage.” The new law will permit civil suits to be filed against any person or entity who causes damage to natural habitats or to fauna or flora that constitute public property. The law also empowers courts hearing these claims to order respondents to pay additional fines for any environmental damage they are found to be responsible for causing in cases where the court determines that this damage can no longer be remedied.
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No Hotel in Sasgon Valley!
For SPNI, the Israel Union for Environmental Defense, and residents of Hevel Eilot, 2019 began with a huge win in their battle to halt the development of a hotel complex that would have resulted in irreparable damage to the Timna Valley. Over the years, tens of thousands of Israelis from all over the country joined our campaign to save Israel’s Sasgon Valley. This campaign has been a resounding success, ending with a win-win solution for both sides. The developers will get their wish to build a hotel in Timna Park while the Sasgon Valley will remain unspoiled.
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The Netiv Ha’asara Dunes Coastal Forest Park
As 2019 came to a close, the Objections Subcommittee published a decision in response to our opposition to plans by the Jewish National Fund and the Ministry of Agriculture to develop Netiv Ha’asara. In a dramatic precedent, the Subcommittee ruled that, of the 6,700 dunams proposed for development in the plans, a total of 5,500 dunams would be earmarked for a nature reserve.
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Open Spaces Strategic Plan
This year, we continued to push forward with our Open Spaces Strategic Plan, the main focus of which is to protect Israel’s ecological corridors at a national, strategic level.
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In addition, we are pleased to be able to report the success of several local campaigns to protect wildlife corridors from needless development and construction. In each of these cases, we worked hard to find solutions that met local development needs without harming nature. As a result, plans to expand the Elad settlement eastwards, which would have damaged a national wildlife corridor, have been halted. We succeeded in protecting the wildlife corridor between the Avihayil National Park and the beach in the Committee for Planning and Building Preferred Residential Areas (CPRA)’s Havatzelet HaSharon plan. Meanwhile, the Modiin city master plan, which was filed a few months ago, no longer includes plans to expand the city into the southern hills. While this is itself a very significant achievement for nature conservation, we will continue to push for Modiin’s southern hills to be declared a nature reserve.
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We will continue to lead the public battle against the “Wine Park” tourism project, as well as the fight to save the wildlife corridor at Givat HaTzvaim near Zichron Yaakov, a magical and rich area of nature that is now facing a real threat of destruction.
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Opposing the Expansion of the CPRA
In recent years, SPNI’s Planning Guardians coalition has focused on opposing the Committee for Planning and Building Preferred Residential Areas (CPRA), which pushes forward hastily-planned, massive development programs across Israel that adversely impact hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens, who simply do not have the tools or knowledge to oppose them.
The transfer of the Israeli Planning Administration from the Ministry of the Interior to the Ministry of Finance has meant that there is no single body to represent the interests of the public in planning processes. To fill this vacuum, we established the Planning Guardians, a coalition of civil society groups and professional housing and environmental planning organizations. Its aim is to foster an independent and professional planning system that gives a voice to civil society.
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Reality is Not Perfect: The Wildlife Corridors Report
This year, we published a report examining threats to Israel’s wildlife corridors. The report shows that without proper management, Israel’s wildlife corridors are losing their ability to fulfill their ecological role. The report sets out the importance of developing a policy-level mechanism for managing the corridors, to ensure their continued functioning. For this to happen, the wildlife corridors and their management must be defined in law, and a body must be established to manage and maintain them to ensure proper supervision and enforcement. The report was launched at an impressive ceremony, with A.B. Yehoshua, an Israeli celebrity novelist, as the guest of honor, which took place during a conference at the Jerusalem Nature Museum, organized in partnership with the Israel Society of Ecology and Environmental Sciences.
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TevaBIZ—Business Protecting Nature
The TevaBIZ project is led by SPNI in partnership with several leading Israeli agricultural companies, the Ministry of Environmental Protection, and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority. It provides businesses with project management tools, the GRI reporting protocol for biodiversity, and support for organizational processes that help integrate procedures, guidelines, and organizational cultures to safeguard biodiversity.
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Through the project, we are collaborating with major companies in Israel’s infrastructure, agriculture, and mining sectors. We are trialing the integration of ecologists into major project planning and implementation decision-making processes, and implementing advanced protocols to minimize ecological risks from invasive species, light pollution, and direct harm to fauna and flora. We also provide ecological management procedures for the specific geographic areas in which the companies operate.
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In addition, we are mapping how businesses influence biodiversity. We provide companies with a functional toolkit to enhance their positive impacts on biodiversity, and to help them integrate environmental guidelines into their organizational culture and internal management systems.
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The project helps Israeli companies to improve risk management around business activities that might damage biodiversity, and to create new market opportunities while improving compliance with regulations. If companies fail to adopt a systemic approach to protecting biodiversity, they will lose public approval--as a result, their ability to operate in Israel and globally will be affected.
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As part of our collaboration with the Ministry of Environmental Protection and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, we have recently completed five projects with Mekorot (the National Water Company of Israel), Netivei Israel (Israel’s National Roads Infrastructure Company), the Milopri Agricultural Cooperative Society, Timna Valley Park, and the Israel Electric Corporation. The projects centered on reducing light pollution, preventing bird collisions from power lines, encouraging agricultural work that supports biodiversity, and implementing an ecological management plan for the Timna Valley Park tourist attraction. We presented the results of these projects at the 2019 “Nature and Business” conference.
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The Eilat Sewage Treatment Plant –the plant incorporates a reservoir that serves as the most important humid habitat in the area. The reservoir is home to a diverse population of bird species, including endangered species like the ferruginous duck, Bonelli’s eagle, the lanner falcon, and Lichtenstein’s sandgrouse. The site also serves as a stop-over for birds migrating north during the spring, who arrive exhausted after crossing the Sahara Desert. We will create a management plan for the plant to help it protect and improve biodiversity by improving its natural infrastructure, addressing environmental hazards, and creating an infrastructure to enable it to integrate its own needs with those of the public, visitors, the environment, and the bird population.
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The Israel Cotton Board Ltd—each season, some 44-110 square kilometers of land in various parts of Israel are used for cotton cultivation, which has a dramatic impact on biodiversity. Our project will focus on developing agricultural management practices that support biodiversity in cotton-growing areas. These practices include protecting natural vegetation, restoring endangered species, and improving wildlife connectivity to help reptile species move between areas of land that have been separated by cotton fields. Finding ways to integrate these management practices into the cotton-growing process will enable cotton farmers to find a balance between protecting Israel’s environment and growing essential agricultural produce.
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Barkan Winery—Barkan is Israel’s largest winery. It manages vineyards in diverse habitats, some of which are adjacent to, or overlap with, wildlife corridors. Our project will focus on developing agricultural management practices to improve wildlife connectivity for large mammal species, including the Israeli mountain gazelle. We will also develop practices to protect natural vegetation and restore endangered or native species to the vineyard areas.
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The Golan Economic Company—the open spaces in the Golan Heights are a significant natural asset that must be protected. Over the next few years, Golan communities are expected to expand, as the development of tourism in the region provides housing and employment for a growing local population. This project will develop a set of guidelines to reduce the marginal effects on biodiversity arising from the development of settlements and tourism in the Golan. The guidelines will address invasive species, light and noise pollution, and organic waste. Implementation of the guidelines will enable the continued development of the Golan, while minimizing negative impacts on the local environment.
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Our work on invasive species in quarries, which we began with Hanson Israel, has not only produced results in Israel (where addressing this issue is a requirement for obtaining a business license from the Ministry of Environmental Protection), but also in Europe. Several years ago, the protocols were translated into English and are now being implemented across Europe.
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Completed Projects
Recently, we completed five projects through the TevaBiz initiative that encourage the conservation of biodiversity to be enshrined in the core activities of private and government companies, including Netivei Israel, Mekorot, the Israel Electricity Company, the Milopri Agricultural Cooperative Society, and Timna Valley Park.
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Netivei Israel: As part of a comprehensive process, Netivei Israel undertook a detailed audit of all its existing and planned roads and classified them according to various levels of sensitivity. A set of planning guidelines was then written for each sensitivity level, according to lighting type, location, the positioning of lighting columns, and permitted light leakage distances.
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Over the next few years, Netivei Israel plans to replace its existing lighting stock with environmentally friendly lighting fixtures, in accordance with the professional specifications we developed during the project. A pilot is currently underway in a dark, ecologically sensitive area adjacent to Kibbutz Samar, where existing lighting is being replaced by environmentally friendly lighting.
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Mekorot: Mekorot owns thousands of facilities across Israel. As part of the project, the facilities were classified according to various sensitivity levels, and different solutions for reducing light pollution were adopted for each level. These solutions included blacking out facilities (wherever this was possible from the point of view of operational and security requirements), to adjusting the type of lighting to reduce light pollution. As a first step, Mekorot has recently blacked out 33 facilities that are located in dark, ecologically sensitive areas in the center of Israel. A pilot is also underway to replace part of the lighting in Mekorot’s largest facility in Ashekelon with environmentally friendly lighting.
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Timna Valley Park: Timna Valley Park is a tourist site in the Arava desert, where visitors enjoy local nature and other attractions. To protect the environment while developing tourism in the area, we have developed an environmental management plan for the Park that deals with issues including event management, the adverse effects of vehicle traffic, lighting, waste, conservation of natural runoff water, and ecological tourism. Currently, Timna Valley Park is making adjustments to some of its garbage bins and lighting fixtures, per the project recommendations, and is in the process of replacing existing lighting fixtures at the Park’s entrance with environmentally friendly lighting.
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Milopri: We developed guidelines for biodiversity friendly agricultural management processes in avocado plantations in the Western Galilee. The processes involve reintroducing local and endangered species, e.g. euphorbia microsphaera Boiss, to the plantation areas, integrating mixed ground cover vegetation in the avocado groves, reducing spraying, and even restoring a vernal pool in Kibbutz Shomrat. Milopri is currently working with an ecologist, who will help implement the project recommendations.
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Working with Communities to Protect Biodiversity
This year, we held our first 'BioBlitz'—an intense period of biological surveying to attempt to record all the living species in a particular area--on the Caesarea sand dunes. The BioBlitz organized by SPNI’s Carmel Field School, and took place over three days, during which we were able to observe and record this area’s incredible natural wealth. Participants were astonished to discover the enormous variety of wildlife hidden in the sand dunes. We intend to use the data collected during the BioBlitz for the statutory protection of this area.
Our main findings: we collected over 70 species of arthropod in 360 pitfall traps that we placed in a wide range of areas, in one of these we found a shrew. On the dirt tracks, we found over 13 species of animal, including cape hare, jackal, skink, Shreiber’s fringe-fingered lizard (an endangered lizard species), Eurasian stone-curlew, and Alectoris. Our camera traps documented golden jackal, wild boar, and Anderson’s gerbil. Our bat detector recorded Kuhl’s pipistrelle. Our butterfly survey found seven butterfly species: painted lady, large white, cabbage white, clouded yellow, green-striped white, bath white, and lesser fiery copper. Our reptile survey found reptiles including short-fingered gecko, Levant water frog, chameleon, and chalcides.
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The construction of the new city of Modiin has shrunk the wildlife corridor in certain areas to a width of less than one kilometer. To ensure that this area remains suitable for wildlife connectivity, SPNI’s Modiin community teamed up with the Israel Orienteering Association to conduct a hazard-mapping exercise. After dividing the area into sections, the orienteers walked through each section and mapped hazards--including barbed wire fences, jagged fence pillars, and building debris—with the help of an app. The mapping exercise helped us clear the hazards to leave a clean, obstacle-free area for wildlife.
The Young Wildlife Patrollers from Beersheba
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In honor of biodiversity month in Beersheba, a fourth-grade wildlife patrol group from Meitar conducted a species survey. The children searched for and identified plant and animal species with the help of field guide handbooks, and then documented them. Not only did these young patrollers learn about the local urban wildlife a short walk from their homes, the information they collected has been included in the wildlife field surveys that we conduct across Israel and will help us to map species and understand the human impact on them.
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Mapping Israel’s Anemones
Thank you for sharing with us! Last winter, we asked the public to take part in our project to map Israel’s anemones, to help us understand why their flowers bloom in different colors in different areas of the country. With the help of the hundreds of reports that you shared with us from across Israel, we were able to map our anemones. We discovered that red anemones, which are more resistant to dry weather, bloom in the south, and that anemones bloom in a range of different colors the further north you go. Please continue sending us your reports this year!
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In the upcoming year, we will continue our work to protect open spaces. This includes lobbying for the regulation of wildlife corridors through statutory protection, effective field management, and addressing environmental threats. We will maintain public transparency, while raising public awareness and developing partnerships with communities to protect Israel’s nature and environment.