The spatial plan until 2040 offered us material for a lot of dangerous and problematic content that offers a vision that condemns ecological Montenegro to absolute urban defeat and collapse, the Center for Bird Protection and Research (CZIP) announced.
"Without the desire for sensationalism and the effort to judge the bulky plan without insight into its essence and only on the basis of presentation, what we can already see in the context of climate change puts us in a serious dilemma about where and where the green agenda of our formerly-rested ecological state is heading. ", the announcement states.
The CZIP said that it is very well known that climate change is accelerating rapidly due to air traffic, and that the state of Montenegro has just decided to open an additional seven airports in response to this fight.
"All this in the wake of the departure of existing operators, shutting down lines and losing their advantage over competing airports such as those in Dubrovnik or Tirana," it added.
"Keeping in mind that we are a country that bases its development on tourism, not the production of toothpicks, the government decides not to invest in strengthening the existing infrastructure, because it is unprofitable, so it has been advocating the privatization of the airport for a long time. Then it is surprising that when we are already offering to someone else to run our businesses more successfully and earn money that we can't make, let's open new construction sites, seven of them. Why, so that after some time we would privatize them too," reads the CZIP announcement.
"Well, someone will say it's not seven new airports, some have already been there before. That's not exactly the case with the one in Ulcinj. Anyone who knows the conditions of the airport in Donji Štoj knows that it's about dry pastures and meadows that are used for grazing sheep. At the same time, these are the most important nesting areas for bee-eaters in our country, with a colony of over 400 pairs of this exotic, legally protected species. The specificity of this species is that, unlike other birds, it does not build its nests on tree branches, but by digging channels deep in the ground where skillfully it hides the birds from predators. The sandy Stoja soil favors this type of nesting, and the construction of the airport infrastructure would mean the absolute destruction of an important habitat for this species," they state.
The CZIP pointed out that a justified question arises as to how these solutions correspond to the fight against climate change.
"Already at the very start, the authors of the spatial plan at least declaratively want to fulfill the goals and offer solutions that will lead us to a bright future of reducing CO2 emissions by 30 percent by 2030. They emphasize this in the presentation itself, because Montenegro also committed to this by signing international conventions. , and thus they also offer solutions that somehow strangely spell water, but actually sound like gasoline," the announcement reads.
"If the authors of the plan can be so precise as to explain how airplanes, as the biggest polluters, contribute to the goal of reducing CO2 emissions (and other emissions that contribute to climate change), then we believe that it is completely justified that Donji Štoj is completely concreted and that instead of cheerfully colored birds, a good airport. It is also up to them to explain to the already engaged international community how reasonable it is to set up an airport in the immediate vicinity of a site such as the Ulcinj Salt Flats, whose favorable ecological status depends on our entry into the European Union. About the safety of the aircraft and passengers themselves, due to the presence of not to mention tens of thousands of birds during migration. It couldn't be greener," the statement concluded.
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