Think tank: Give state environmental bodies more power and funds during war
Taub Center for Social Policy Studies warns decision makers of need to better prepare for potential disasters such as oil spills, damage to fuel tanks, emission of toxic materials
Sue Surkes is The Times of Israel's environment reporter
State bodies tasked with protecting the environment should be given additional powers, personnel and budgets in order to minimize the potential for the war against Hamas to cause widespread environmental damage, a report published Sunday argues.
Legislation should also be passed to strengthen those bodies where relevant, said the paper, titled The Environment in Wartime, produced by the Jerusalem-based Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel.
In their report, Maya Sadeh, head of the center’s environment and health program, and senior researcher Dr. Rakefet Shafran-Nathan, list some of the immediate environmental threats of the war.
There are 3,700 stores of hazardous materials in Israel, the report said, particularly in the areas of Ashkelon, on the southern Mediterranean coast, and Haifa Bay in the north. These put the health of some 3.2 million residents at risk of a hazardous materials event.
During Operation Guardian of the Walls in May 2021, a rocket hit an oil storage tank in Ashkelon that burned for days, polluting the air and badly impacting public health.
Given the security risks in Israel, stocks of liquefied petroleum gas are stored underground.
The Home Front Command is responsible for ensuring that facilities cannot cause harm during emergencies such as war.
In 2007, a committee published the findings of a probe of protective measures taken by factories that manufacture and store hazardous materials in the Haifa Bay area — one of many earthquake zones in the country. Its recommendations included strengthening pipelines that carry hazardous materials and fortifying storage tanks from above.
According to a state comptroller report last year, the Environmental Protection Ministry began to establish a better system for dealing with hazardous materials in the wake of that report, but work is still incomplete.
Furthermore, six out of nine firefighting stations with hazardous material units do not meet the firefighter training standards for dealing with hazardous materials events, and response times are longer than the global standard.
On the availability of clean water during a crisis, the Taub document cited another 2022 state comptroller report (in Hebrew) which found that in the event of an emergency, local authorities representing 2.4 million Israelis would not be prepared to supply water immediately, while the Water Authority was ready to supply just 400,000 of those people.
About one in three hospitals has no emergency water stored.
The state comptroller also found that wells in which the Health Ministry found pollutants, such as fuel, fertilizer and sewage, had been closed, with no plans to rehabilitate them, and that more than a quarter of all wells — about 500 — were either not in use or usable with limitations.
In an emergency, when water desalination may not be possible, the ability to pump groundwater was crucial, the state comptroller said, calling for polluted wells to be cleaned up.
At the beginning of the current war, there was concern about a shortage of chlorine, which is imported, to purify drinking water, the Taub report said. The Health Ministry has called in the past for a chlorine store to be established, or for an Israeli producer of chlorine to get a permit, but nothing has been done so far.
A longer-term consequence of the war pointed out in the Taub report was the government’s decision last month to borrow NIS 820 million ($221 million) from the Environmental Protection Ministry’s roughly NIS 3.2 billion ($863 million) Maintenance of Cleanliness Fund in order to help pay reserve soldiers.
That loan was raised to NIS 1.42 billion ($382 million) during budget discussions.
It came on top of the NIS 1.66 billion ($448 million) that the government creamed off the same fund a couple of years ago in a way that the state comptroller found to be out of line both with the goals of the fund and the law underpinning it.
In March, the Environmental Protection Ministry announced it would earmark money from this fund, which is financed mainly by landfill fees, to build facilities that sort waste, separate organic waste from other streams and burn waste to produce energy.
These moves would be part of a national strategy to lower the proportion of waste sent to landfills, which currently stands at 80 percent and is far higher than in other developed countries.
The Taub report noted that the cuts to the cleanliness fund would likely delay the implementation of the national waste strategy.
On Tuesday, discussions on the issue were frozen just before a meeting at which the head of the fund was expected to approve the loans. That was after the umbrella Federation of Local Authorities protested the move and threatened to take the issue to the courts.
The move to cut money from the fund and divert it to the war effort stands in stark contrast to the more than fourfold increase in funds planned for the Settlements and National Projects Ministry, which emerged during a Knesset Finance Committee on Monday.
Several hundreds of millions of additional shekels are also expected to flow to ultra-Orthodox private education, which skirts supervision by the Education Ministry.
Opposition Leader Yair Lapid told the committee that money was being earmarked for “everything that can help the prime minister remain in power a little longer,” while IDF units were seeking donations to purchase military equipment such as ceramic vests.
An Environmental Protection Ministry spokesperson said Sunday that the government had authorized the ministry to commit up to NIS 2 billion ($540 million) for the waste projects — cash that would be taken from the fund’s future revenues. The Finance Ministry had also budgeted an additional NIS 49 million ($13 million) for additional waste created as a result of the war.
Another consequence of the war highlighted in the report is Jordan’s cancellation of a tripartite agreement brokered by the United Arab Emirates and the US two years ago. This would have seen the UAE build solar facilities in the Hashemite Kingdom for Israel’s use, in return for Israel providing Jordan with desalinated water.
Cancellation of the project will make it harder to reach the state’s target of providing 30 percent of its energy by 2030 from renewable sources, the report pointed out.
A further consequence is the state’s temporary approval for increased amounts of oil to be stored at the Europe Asia Pipeline Company’s Red Sea facility in Eilat in the south. The oil must be earmarked for Israeli use only.
“This measure increases the existing environmental risk of an oil spill,” the report said, in a unique coral-rich marine environment upon which Eilat’s large tourism industry depends.
Much of Israel’s Mediterranean coast was covered with tar in the winter of 2021, following a spill incident involving a foreign oil tanker at sea. The government promised to budget and anchor in law a long-overdue National Program for Preparedness and Response to Maritime Oil Pollution Events. That has still not happened.
On November 5, the Israel Electric Corporation announced that it would spend NIS 600 million ($162 million) on highly polluting diesel fuel, which is seldom used for electricity during peacetime. The burning of diesel, coal or mazut (heavy oil) produces higher quantities of particulate matter and nitrogen oxide than natural gas, in addition to sulfur dioxide, which harms the cardiorespiratory system.
