From February of 2021, the Social Justice Center (formerly EMC), with the support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, is implementing a project titled: "Human Rights Dimension of the Environmental Issues."

The project is aimed to tackle unsustainable development of hydropower infrastructure and to address the opaque, environmentally unaccountable practices prevalent in the mining industry which produce irreversible damage to local social and natural environments around the country. The project acknowledges that these industries produce controversies that are both intensely local (which is why hydropower development and mining trigger some of the most prominent resistance movements in Georgia) and deeply consequential for national policy because of the central role they occupy both in the economy and the public imagination.

Two areas of environmental policy will be in the major focus of the project for their cross-cutting nature and for the scale and inequitable nature of risks that they produce: exploitation of water resources and the extraction of fossil fuels and precious minerals.

To this end, the project sets out the following objectives:

• Major flaws of the current regulatory framework regarding the governance of water resources are identified and analyzed;
• Current legislation and practices of ecological monitoring, and taxation policy related to the extraction of natural resources are investigated and analyzed;
• Ongoing and emergent environmental campaigns targeting water governance and mining are empowered with up-to-date knowledge and tools for effective advocacy.
• Public debate surrounding water resources and mining for precious metals is informed with evidence-based analysis.

Share