E4075 V4 Republic of Yemen Ministry of Public Works and Highways ROAD MAINTENANCE FUND - IMPLEMENTATION UNIT. (RMF-IU) ROAD ASSET MANAGEMENT PROJECT-RAMP ECECUTIVE SUMMARY FOR LAHJ GOVERNORATE SUB-PROJECT (416km) Prepared by: RMF-IU 12/19/2013 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (2) : Lahj Governorate Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Environmental and social Impact Assessment ‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Republic of Yemen Ministry of Public Works and Highways ROAD MAINTENANCE FUND - IMPLEMENTATION UNIT. (RMF-IU) ROAD ASSET MANAGEMENT PROJECT-RAMP ECECUTIVE SUMMARY FOR LAHJ GOVERNORATE SUB-PROJECT (416km) Final Prepared by: RMF-IU Revised in December 2013 1 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (2) : Lahj Governorate Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Environmental and social Impact Assessment ‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 1. Introduction The Environmental and Social Management Plan (ESMP) study contains the results of the environmental and social impact assessment undertaken for the Backlog Repairs and Maintenance Works Phase of the sub-project of Lahj Governorate located in the southern part of Yemen. This sub-project is part of the Road Maintenance Fund (RMF), financed under Road Asset Management Project (RAMP). This ESMP report complies with the Bank’s Environmental and Social Policies and the Relevant Yemen Regulations. Due to the scope of work limited to backlog repairs and maintenance activities, the project is classified as category B. The ESMP document identifies and assesses the environmental and social risks and impacts of the project. In addition, the report determines the necessary mitigation measures and summarizes the necessary management and monitoring plans to ensure that impacts are dealt with and mitigation measures are followed during the project activities. The environmental and social review guidelines stipulated in the OP 4.01, impact screening and scoping checklists, and consultations with the PAPs carried out between the 20th of December 2012 and the 10th of January 2013 were the main tools used during the preparation of this ESMP report. 2. Sub-Project Objectives The sub-project development objective is to upgrade the existing paved roads to good conditions and to prevent its deterioration. Furthermore, to improve traffic safety at critical locations, improve slope stability at mountainous roads, clean cross drainage and side ditches and remove the illegal speed bumps and build new safe speed bumps. A very important objective is to alleviate poverty in the area by creating local employment through road maintenance works by improving access to basic services such as schools, health centers and markets. The backlog maintenance works of the proposed sub-project will meet the future demand for better transportation and communication between many districts and villages of the Lahj Governorate. In addition, keeping in view an anticipated overall development in the southern region of the country, it will reduce travel time and the cost of freight traffic between districts, cities and villages. 3. Sub-Project Description The RAMP sub-project no. (2) - Lahj governorate is composed of ten roads with the total length of 416.7km. The target roads include four main roads, four secondary roads, and two tertiary roads as follows: 1. Al Turbah - Tawr Al Bahah: tertiary road, length 9 km. 2. Sabir - Alwaht - Tawr AlBahah: secondary road, length 81 km. 3. Ras Amran - Ras AlArah: main road, length 115 km. 4. Ras Amran - Al What: secondary road, length 17km. 5. Al Hosaini -Al Alam: secondary road, length 34.7 km. 6. Al Habilain - Al Askriah: main road, length 34 km. 7. AlAskarial - Wdi Yaher: main road, length 46 km. 8. Wdi Yaher -Labous –al-Baida: main road, length 54 km. 9. Aqqan - Al Mosaimeer: secondary road, length 9 km. 10. Al Rahidah - Al Moghaniah: tertiary road, length 17 km. 2 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (2) : Lahj Governorate Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Environmental and social Impact Assessment ‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ The roads run in different topographical regions such as: mountainous, coastal, deserts and agricultural Wadi basins. Consequently, terrains range from flat, flat-rolling, flat-rolling- mountainous to pure mountainous. The scope of works include: structural excavation, gabions construction, construction of stone masonry with culverts and walls, installation of safety barriers and handrails, cleaning blocked drainage, repairs of riprap, road resurfacing, crack sealing, repairs and cleaning of shoulders, installation of pipe culverts, pavement marking, installation of subsoil filter drains, installation of road signs. All rehabilitation and backlog works of this sub-project will be conducted within the ROW. No additional land acquisition is required. 4. Legal and Institutional Framework This ESMP is developed by following the guidelines as set forth in ESIAF prepared in December 2012 for RAMP, which was approved by the Bank. The ESMP of this sub-project is carried out to meet the requirements of the Environment Protection Law (EPL) No. 26 of 1995 in Yemen to protect the environment, natural resources, society and health. The provisions of this framework law are implemented through Executive Regulations (By-Law 148-2000), issued by a decree of the Council of Ministers. According to the Law 25 described above, the EMP is required for road maintenance works. In addition, this ESMP report has been prepared in conformity with World Bank Operational Policy (OP/BP/GP 4.01). The OP/BP/GP 4.12 is not triggered for this sub-project. 5. Baseline Conditions Baseline environmental and social conditions were studied and presented in the ESMP. The information was collected from the existing reports, papers and publications, as well as field surveys by environmental and social specialists and public consultations carried out between 20 December 2012 and 10 January 2013. The following baseline conditions were presented: physical environment, biological environment, socio-economic aspects including health and safety. Details are presented in chapter 3. 6. Environmental and Social Impacts Assessment The impact analysis for both the backlog repairs and maintenance works indicates that overall, the beneficial impacts of the RAMP- Lahj sub project on physical and natural resources, safety, job creation and local economic development are high compared. They are expected to outweigh the negative impacts. All potentially adverse impacts arising during rehabilitation works could be mitigated satisfactorily through the inclusion of suitable Environmental and Social Mitigation Measures and Monitoring Program attached as an annex to the bidding documents. The project activities that are likely to cause deterioration of environmental quality and social integrity are:  Generation, storage and disposal of debris and construction waste.  Trucking and application of construction materials.  Resurfacing of roads.  Storage and handling of fuel and oils.  Operation of labour camps. 3 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (2) : Lahj Governorate Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Environmental and social Impact Assessment ‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ The generation, temporary storage and disposal of debris and construction waste are likely to lead to deterioration of environmental quality and social status. This activity is predicted to have minor negative impacts on the siltation, slope stability, surface runoff, agricultural land, air quality, vegetation, wild life movement and landscape. Tracking of materials is predicted to cause increase of noise levels and vibration, and deterioration of air quality through dust emissions. Road works and resurfacing is predicted to lead to increase noise levels, deterioration of air quality and reduced safety during the repairs works. Storage of diesel and oil, and refueling of vehicles is expected to cause contamination risk to agricultural land, surface and groundwater, and safety of project staff. Leakages or spillages of fuel and oils can affect habitats in the Khor Umairah lagoon located along the coastal road. However, the risk and the volumes involved are minor. The setting up and operation of labor camps may create minor increase of noise levels, temporary taking of land, deterioration of landscape value, local littering and minor sewage discharges. Potential conflicts may arise if the location is not carefully selected in consultation with local communities. Since this project does not involve the construction of new roads, and realignment of existing roads would not be considered, the negative impacts associated with resettlement and land acquisition are not expected, therefore the Bank policy on Involuntary Resettlement OP 4.12 is not triggered, The project activities will generate also positive environmental and social impacts. The positive environmental impacts include: reduced soil erosion and siltation of surface water, and improved slope stability and surface runoff. 7. Environmental and Social Mitigation Measures This section discusses the Environmental and Social Mitigation Measures (ESMM) for the proposed sub-project. Mitigation measures address the predicted impacts. The key mitigation measures proposed include: storage of construction waste in locations pre- agreed with the local communities, waste disposal in designated locations, handling of liquid waste in sealed containers, repairs of retaining walls, restoration of riprap and stone pitching, restoration of adequate drainage systems, planting trees in sensitive zones, restoration of vegetative cover, usage of well-maintained equipment, water spraying for dust control, limiting noisy activities to normal daylight hours, keeping the drainage ditches and culverts unblocked, provision and use of personal protective equipment to workers, installing construction and warning signs, provision of alternative temporary access roads. Most of the proposed mitigation measures will be ensured under provisions of the construction supervision contract documents and as necessary by agreement with the communities that will be stated in the SFA. All costs associated with the mitigation measures for all environmental and social impacts would be incorporated into the overall sub-project budget. 4 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (2) : Lahj Governorate Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Environmental and social Impact Assessment ‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ 8. Environmental and Social Monitoring During the maintenance activities, the regular monitoring activities relays on the supervising consultant of all environmental and social impacts to determine contractor compliance or otherwise with the ESMP. The consultant will monitor the application of environmental and social mitigation measures and the result of monitoring activities shall be reflected in the monthly reports. Summary of the environmental and social monitoring plan in presented in table A. The total estimated costs of the monitoring activities is USD 25,600. The sub-project officer at Road Asset Management Project Implementation Unit (RAMP-IU) shall conduct monthly to bi-monthly site inspections to monitor the compliance of both the contractor and the supervising consultant with the applications of all mitigation measures for environmental and social impacts. Photographic documentation will be required in the continuous and regular monitoring. The Environmental and Social Specialist within the RAMP will be responsible for overall monitoring of all roads under the sub-project. The responsibility is to follow up and monitor the contractor, consultant and the sub-project officer and review monthly reports on contractor’s compliance. The monitoring result will be archived in a dossier. 9. Environmental and Social Management Plan Summary of the Environmental and Social Management Plan (ESMP) is presented in a tabular format at the end of this section and in chapter 7 of this report (see also table B below). The objective of this ESMP is to establish a mechanism to implement mitigation measures for the expected negative impacts and to monitor the efficiency of these mitigation measures. The content of the ESMP table of this sub- project is based on the findings of this study and consultations with local stakeholders (Project Affected People). The total estimated costs of the ESMP (including mitigation measures and monitoring) is USD 36,100. 10. Social Consultations Consultations were carried out with both male and female beneficiaries. The men consultations from the affected local communities along the road were carried out from December 2012 to January 2013. Thirty eight sites were selected in the 10 road sections. A total of 125 beneficiaries were randomly selected and interviewed (see table 8.1). Due to the fact that most of the respondents are illiterate, data was collected by face-to-face interviews. The interview started by a general talk and a brief explanation of the nature and objectives of the study to gain the trust and confidence of the respondents to ensure the most reliable responses. The woman consultations were carried out in June 2013 through field visit and interview with women in different villages along the project road sections. In total, 113 women were interviewed in 30 villages. During the consultation process, questionnaires were used to solicit people’s views, concerns, and feedback on the road maintenance activities to be financed by the project. The key findings of the consultation are summarized in the Chapter 8. 5 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (2) : Lahj Governorate Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Environmental and social Impact Assessment ‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ 11. Conclusions The project is expected to generate minor negative environmental and social impacts. The rehabilitated infrastructure will be environmentally sound in their design, sitting, maintenance and operation. Conventional engineering designs with proven records of reliable performance will be adopted for the rehabilitation of each road. The minor adverse environmental and social impacts anticipated during the rehabilitation works can be mitigated by applying measures set out in the ESMP. The total expected costs of the mitigation measures and monitoring costs is estimated at the level of USD 36,000. When properly and consistently applied, these measures are expected to minimize the potential impacts to negligible levels. The sub-project will have substantial socio-economic and environmental benefits resulting from road improvements after completion of the backlog repairs and maintenance works. 6 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (2) : Lahj Governorate Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Environmental and social Impact Assessment ‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Table A. Summary of monitoring activities during backlog works and repairs stage. No. Impact Monitoring Activity Frequency Responsibility Costs Deterioration of Monitoring water quality of the Twice a year Supervision 1 groundwater groundwater wells in vicinity of the USD 600 consultant quality ten roads Generation, Maintaining a record of type, storage, disposal quantity, and disposal location of Once a week for each 2 of construction solid and liquid waste generation road and domestic waste Landslides, soil Site inspection and photographic Once a week for each erosion, and documentation of excavation and road 3 Visual intrusion maintenance activities Photographic documentation of planting and re-vegetation activities Deterioration of Visual observation and photographic Once a week for each air quality documentation of equipment road 4 induced emissions and dust clouds during excavation activities Increased level Site supervision/inspection and Once a week for each of noise documentation to ensure the road 5 implementation of mitigation measures Disruption of Close supervision and Once a week for each water supply documentation of pipe re-location road One full time Supervising social and activities consultant in 6 environmental Observing nearby springs for coordination monitoring potential siltation following a with dedicated specialist, rainfall event engineer- travel costs, Disruption of the Site inspection and photographic Twice a month during specialist from camera runoff water and documentation of water harvesting the rainy season RMF USD 25,000 7 drainage systems activities and re-vegetation activities Checking on culverts particularly following rainfall events Damage to fauna Site inspection and photographic Once a month for 8 and flora documentation of excavation, re- each road planting activities, Disruption of Site supervision-inspection and Weekly including traffic photographic documentation photographic 9 documentation for each road Deterioration of Inspection/supervision and health & safety photographic documentation 10 conditions Maintaining a record of injuries and Weekly for each road accidents specifying cause and location Social Impacts Site inspection and documentation of community activities along roads 11 Weekly for each road and documented. Monitoring of the workers camp. EXPECTED TOTAL COSTS: USD 25,600 7 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (2) : Lahj Governorate Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Environmental and social Impact Assessment ‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Table B. Summary of the ESMP during the Backlog Repair Works Phase Impact Mitigation Measures Monitoring Monitoring Implementation Cost estimation No. frequency Responsibility Generation, Waste minimization Maintaining a record storage, Storage of construction of type, quantity, and Will be part of the disposal of waste in locations pre- disposal location of contract. Bidders construction agreed with the local solid and liquid waste will be able to and domestic communities generation cost this item in waste Construction waste reuse Once a week their bids. 1 Contractor Waste disposal in for each road Expected designated locations additional costs: Handling of liquid waste USD 1,000 + cost in sealed containers of monitoring Solid and liquid waste specialist management plan Landslides, Repairs of retaining Site inspection and soil erosion, walls photographic and Visual Restoration of riprap and documentation of intrusion stone pitching excavation and Provision of an open maintenance activities Will be part of the area ~1m wide, behind Photographic contract. Bidders cut side channels, to documentation of will be able to accommodate planting and re- cost this item in Supervision temporarily fallen debris vegetation activities Once a week their bids. 2 Consultants and Increase the mass for each road Expected Contractors thickness of rock fill for additional costs: additional stability USD 2,000 + cost Restoration of drainage of monitoring systems specialist Planting trees in sensitive zones Restoration of vegetative cover Deterioration Usage of well- Visual observation Once a week Will be part of the Contractor in of air quality maintained equipment and photographic for each road works contract. coordination Water spraying for dust documentation of Expected with the 3 control equipment induced additional costs: Supervising emissions and dust USD 2,000+ cost Consultant clouds during of monitoring and RMF excavation activities specialist Increased Usage of quiet/well- Site Once a week Contractor in Will be part of the level of noise maintained equipment supervision/inspection for each road coordination contract. Bidders Usage of operational and documentation to with the will be able to noise mufflers ensure the Supervising cost this item in Limiting noisy activities implementation of Consultant their bids 4 to normal daylight hours mitigation measures and RMF Provision of speed limit In addition cost of signs at critical locations monitoring Planting trees in specialist sensitive zones Disruption of Protecting water supply Close supervision and Once a week Contractor in Will be part of the water supply systems during works documentation of pipe for each road coordination contract. Bidders Coordination with land re-location activities with the will be able to owners on scheduling Observing nearby Supervising cost this item in 5 maintenance activities springs for potential Consultant their bids. Ensuring constant water siltation following a and RMF In addition cost of supply during works. rainfall event monitoring specialist 8 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (2) : Lahj Governorate Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Environmental and social Impact Assessment ‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Disruption ofProper side sloping the Site inspection and Twice a month Contractor in Will be part of the the runoff road to prevent the photographic during the rainy coordination contract. Bidders water and accumulation of water documentation of season with the will be able to drainage on the road surface water harvesting Supervising cost this item in 6 systems Re-vegetation of activities and re- Consultant their bids. disturbed soils vegetation activities and RMF Keeping the drainage Checking on culverts In addition cost of ditches and culverts particularly following monitoring unblocked rainfall events specialist Deterioration Storage of liquid Monitoring water Once every two Contractor in Will be part of the of materials (especially quality of the months coordination contract. Bidders groundwater hydrocarbons) in sealed groundwater wells with the will be able to quality containers. Supervising cost this item in 7 Refueling in sealed Consultant their bids. locations and RMF Expected Application of liquid additional costs: materials and waste USD 2,000 + 600 management plans monitoring Damage to Placing speed limit signs Site inspection and Once a week Contractor in Will be part of the fauna and and planting trees at photographic for each road coordination contract. Bidders flora critical locations and documentation of with the will be able to known animal crossing excavation and re- Supervising cost this item in pathways planting activities Consultant their bids. Keeping culverts and RMF 8 unblocked to facilitate Expected amphibians crossing additional costs: Restoring affected land USD 2,500 + cost along the road alignment of monitoring to preconstruction status specialist Preventing leakages of fuel . Disruption of Informing the public Site supervision- Contractor in Will be part of the traffic about schedule of inspection and coordination contract. Bidders repairs/maintenance photographic Weekly with the will be able to works documentation (including Supervising cost this item in 9 Provision of temporary photographic Consultant their bids. alternative access roads/ evidence (for and RMF In addition cost of by-passes each road) monitoring On the spot traffic specialist management Deterioration Provision and use of Inspection/supervision Contractor in Will be part of the of health & personal protective & photo coordination contract. Bidders safety equipment to workers documentation with the will be able to conditions Installing construction Maintaining records Weekly fore Supervising cost this item in 10 and warning signs of injuries and each road Consultant their bids. accidents with cause and RMF In addition cost of and location monitoring specialist Social Impacts Shortening the road Site inspection and Contractor in Will be part of the works period documentation of coordination contract. Bidders Coordinating with the community activities with the will be able to public the schedule of along roads and Supervising cost this item in maintenance activities documented. Consultant their bids. Weekly for 11 Provision of alternative and RMF Expected each road access roads/ by-passes additional cost: Traffic management USD 1,000 Camps must be equipped In addition cost of with sealed septic tanks monitoring and waste containers. specialist TOTAL EXPECTED ADDITIONAL COSTS: USD 36,100 9 ‫)‪Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF‬‬ ‫‪Sub-Project (2) : Lahj Governorate‬‬ ‫)‪Road Assets Management Project (RAMP‬‬ ‫‪Environmental and social Impact Assessment‬‬ ‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ ‫‪10‬‬