Filed Visits Within the Project “Enhanced Cross-Sectoral Land Management Through Land Use Pressure Reduction and Planning”
The UN Environment Agency, recognizing the lack of capacity of the institutions dealing with land and the dissemination of relevant data, as well as the insufficient collaboration between institutions, initiated the establishment of a multidisciplinary expert working group for identification, status determination and research of potentially contaminated sites that might have a tremendous negative effect on the environment and human health. Members of the multidisciplinary working group are the representatives of the following institutions: Ministry of Agriculture and Environmental Protection, Provincial Secretariat for Urban Planning and Environmental Protection, Republic Inspection for Land, Soil Institute in Belgrade, Institute for Field and Vegetable Crops in Novi Sad, Serbian Environmental Protection Agency, Geological Survey of Serbia, Belgrade Public Health Institute and Republic Hydrometeorological Service of Serbia.
Field visits started on September 6, 2016, when experts from the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA), Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA), as well as representatives of the Serbian Ministry of Agriculture and Environmental Protection, Serbian Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA), the Belgrade Public Health Institute, the Institute for Field and Vegetable Crops from Novi Sad, the Geological Survey of Serbia and Soil Institute from Belgrade visited the abandoned facility of the Chemical Industry “Viskoza” in Loznica and the former complex “Zorka – obojeni metali” in Šabac, performed soil sampling and analysis using Portable X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometry (XRF). On that occasion, it was organized a meeting of the Italian experts, representatives of the multidisciplinary expert working group and local authorities.
In the second half of 2016, the multidisciplinary expert working group visited 37 sites (industrial and mining complexes, power generation plants) in 23 local governments throughout Serbia in ordred to establish the status of business entities and collect available data and information on the state of the companies, treatment of hazardous waste and the risk of soil contamination.