Environment & Community
legal and planning assistance program

For communities suffering from environmental hazards in their neighborhoods such as solid waste dumps, air pollution, water contamination, lack of public open spaces, and evelopment that threatens quality of life - something can be done!

Every year, Adam Teva V'Din responds to over 500 appeals from all sectors of the population - Jews, Arabs, religiously observant and secular. Adam Teva V'Din extends legal advice and planning assistance as well as guidance on how community activism and public-awareness building through its inter-disciplinary team of lawyers, urban planners, and specialists in environmental protection of water, land and air resources.

Adam Teva V'Din's offers pro bono assistance, including legal representation in court and at hearings of the planning authorities. The Environment & Community program works in lose cooperation with community representatives.

The Environment & Community program works on the principle of "environmental justice," tackling first environmental threats that impact unfairly on socially or economically disadvantaged communities and prioritizing threats to the human, lived-in environment such as air and water pollution, health hazards and loss of public open spaces. For example, recent Environment & Community activities include:

· legal action that closed an asbestos waste dump adjacent to the Western Galilee village of Sheikh Danun

· a campaign based on Adam Teva V'Din's expert opinion cancelled plans for a
power station to be built in a Kiryat Shmona neighborhood

· legal action and public pressure combined compelled authorities to close the
Modi'in landfill next to the village of Shoham

· assistance to civic leaders in filing planning objections to an industrial area
next to homes in the Arab village of Nahaf.

Adam Teva V'Din encourages communities working for a better environment to send their requests in writing, giving full details, to Adam Teva V'Din at 85 Nahalat Binyamin Street, Tel Aviv 66102 or by email: tzibur@iued.org.il.