As someone who deals with promotion, experience creation, and strategic destination development, I view the construction of three mini hydroelectric power plants (MHPs) and two more announced on the Sutjeska and its tributary Jabušnica as a catastrophic business decision with unforeseeable long-term consequences.
People seem to be consciously destroying their most valuable market product for the sake of negligible energy profit, in an age where clean water and nature are a great luxury.
Sutjeska National Park, the oldest in Bosnia and Herzegovina, is a world-class brand.
By concreting the riverbed and putting the river in pipes, we are taking away the essence of that brand. Tourists will certainly not come to see the dry riverbed and the machine building.
Objectively speaking, small hydropower plants are a technologically and economically outdated concept in protected areas, with a negligible energy contribution in the bigger picture, but with permanent and irreversible destruction and devastation of the landscape that has been created over millennia.
Of particular concern is the ease of issuing concessions and so-called “ecological permits.” Permits that do not take into account the cumulative impact on biodiversity and the visual identity of the park have no value other than procedural, with which, project by project, “concession by concession,” we lose the essence.
This is not just a problem for environmentalists or nature lovers, although they like to present it that way, this is a problem of survival in general, in the long term.
If we destroy Sutjeska, Duboka, Pliva...you name it, we have destroyed future jobs, we have destroyed the potential for sustainable, high-value tourism, and we have destroyed the legacy that we are obligated to leave to those who come after us.
Since for some only numbers are important, then let me tell you that sustainable development implies the use of interest, not spending the principal, and nature, in this case the National Park is our principal.
These kinds of projects will, collectively, backfire on us. When we realize that we cannot live off of destroyed nature, and that small hydropower plants only bring profit to individuals while the local community is left with a dry riverbed, it will be too late.