EcoLur
Lawyer Heghine Grigoryan, a grantee of USAID “Participatory and Effective Use of Water Resources” program, is proposing to RA Ministry of Environment to make the process of issuing water use permits more transparent and to increase the awareness of the impacted communities of the process of issuing water use permits. For this purpose, she has submitted to RA Ministry of Environment the document she developed, which is entitled “On Notification of Local Self-government Bodies about Applications for Water Use Permits”. The current legislation doesn’t prescribe any effective tools for the proper notification of the society about issuing water use permits. “By increasing the awareness of the communities of the process on issuing water use permits we want to make real the right of our residents to take part in the decision-making on water use permits,” Heghine Grigoryan said in her interview with EcoLur. She proposed RA Ministry of Environment to notify the impacted community about the application about the water use permit. An impacted community shall be considered not only the community where the water use will be factually implemented, but also those communities which are located down the water use point till the very last community, whereas in case of using groundwater – all the communities making use of the given groundwater basin.
It is proposed to provide the following information about the water use permit to the impacted communities:
- Name of water user, address
- Venue of water use
- Venue of water intake
- Coordinates of water spring
- Purpose of water use
- Volume of water use, including that of surface water resources and groundwater resources
- Duration and regime of water use
- How much water will be left in the water body after water use
- Environmental flow in case of surface water resources
- Permissible volumes of wastewater dumped into water resources or their drainage basins
- Description of outflow
- Whether there are information about water standards and/or publications about them
- Requirements posed to drilling deep wells, if the object of the water use permit is for drilling a new well,
- All current water uses from the given water object,
- Monitoring data on water amount mentioning the date of the last monitoring,
- Impacted community (communities)
- Form of ownership of water spring.
The document submitted to RA Ministry of Environment, entitled “On Notification of Local Self-government Bodies about Applications for Water Use Permits” has been developed within the frames of “Expanding Access to Information on Applications for Water Use Permits” subgrant of USAID-funded “Participatory and Effective Use of Water Resources” program.
This publication has been prepared within the frames of “Protect Your Right to Water” project with the support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), whereas the opinions expressed or the content of the publications don’t necessarily represent the official views and opinions of USAID.
August 08, 2019 at 15:21