40 groups contest move to dilute environmental oversight of big projects

Some 40 environmental, health, and other civil society organizations appealed to the Interior Ministry and the National Planning Council on Sunday against moves to replace the Environmental Protection Ministry’s detailed probes into the likely environmental impacts of large infrastructure projects with generic, one-size-fits-all assessments ordered by the council head and completed by private consultants.

The proposal, according to an explanation on the planning council’s website in preparation for a discussion on Tuesday, will allow for “the shortening of planning procedures by providing certainty to the entrepreneur and the planning institution regarding the required framework.”

Relevant to infrastructure projects in fields such as transportation, waste management, energy, and mining and quarrying, it was included in the Economic Arrangements Bill that accompanied the 2026 state budget.

The planning council, Israel’s supreme planning body, explained, “The goal of this move is to streamline and expedite planning procedures, so that it will be possible to use a generic base of guidelines to which adjustments will be made, as required, according to the unique characteristics of a plan.”

The council said that the directors of the planning council and the ministry had met to coordinate guidelines and had agreed to bring any differences they could not resolve to debate.

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It went on, “While the Planning Administration’s position is that the set of generic guidelines should include the relevant base guidelines, which will be refined in each plan according to its characteristics, the Environmental Protection Ministry proposes a very broad and detailed set of guidelines, including requirements for addressing all possible situations, from which the environmental consultant of the planning institution is required to choose the relevant clauses for the discussed plan.”

There were also disagreements over the level of detail required,  the statement said.

Among the organizations to appeal the move are the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, Adam Teva V’Din, the Israel Association of Public Health Physicians, Green Course, Zalul, and 15 Minutes. Some 1,300 individuals have also submitted opposition through the SPNI.

In a letter they sent out Sunday, the organizations wrote, “The environmental impact assessment is not a bureaucratic obstacle that must be bypassed or reduced; it constitutes the only professional and scientific safety net that ensures that development processes in the country will not exact an irreversible price – health, ecological, and economic – from the public.”

“Therefore, there is great importance that whoever provides the guidelines for the assessments will be the Ministry of Environmental Protection, and not, as is proposed, the head of the Planning Administration. The attempts to weaken the ministry’s guidelines, reduce the scope of the tests, such as for air quality, hazardous materials, noise, hydrology, and natural values, or to switch to superficial environmental documents – directly harm the ability of the members of planning institutions to make informed decisions about development plans.”

The letter continued that an in-depth environmental assessment allowed for the examination of real planning alternatives at a stage when change was still possible. The planning institutions, especially the National Planning Council and the Interior Ministry, were obligated to strike a balance among development needs, environmental protection, and public health.

The Environmental Protection Ministry was unable to comment by press time.