E4075 v16 Republic of Yemen Ministry of Public Works and Highways ROAD MAINTENANCE FUND Road Asset Management Project ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIALMANAGEMENT PLAN PROJECT: CONSTRUCTION AND OPREATION OF FOUR AXEL LOAD STATIONS. 3- BRUM SITE - HADRAMOUT GOVERNORATE December 2014 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Brum Axle Weigh Station ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Republic of Yemen Ministry of Public Works and Highways ROAD MAINTENANCE FUND Road Asset Management Project ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL MANAGEMENT PLAN PROJECT: CONSTRUCTION AND OPERATION OF FOUR AXEL LOAD STATIONS 3. BRUM SITE - HADRAMOUT GOVERNORATE December 2014 Prepared by: RMFIU Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Brum Axle Weigh Station ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S 1.   EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 1   2.   OBJECTIVES AND DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT 6   2.1   PROJECT DESCRIPTION 6   3.   LEGAL FRAMEWORK 10   3.1   NATIONAL LEGAL FRAMEWORK 10   3.2   WORLD BANK ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL SAFEGUARDS AND POLICIES 11   4.   ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL BASELINE CONDITIONS 13   4.1   LOCATION AND ACQUISITION OF LAND 13   4.2   TOPOGRAPHY 14   4.3   ROADS AND TRAFFIC 14   4.4   CLIMATE 14   4.5   AIR QUALITY 14   4.6   HYDROLOGY 14   4.7   NOISE 14   4.8   TERRESTRIAL HABITATS 14   4.9   COASTAL AND MARINE HABITAT 15   4.10   THE PROPOSED BALHAF-BRUM MARINE PROTECTED AREA (BBMPA) 16   4.11   SOCIO-ECONOMIC 17   5.   ANALYSIS OF PROJECT ALTERNATIVES 18   5.1   “NO-PROJECT” ALTERNATIVE 18   5.2   LOCATOIN “A” 18   5.3   LOCATION “B” 18   6.   POTENTIAL ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL IMPACTS 19   6.1   IMPACT SCOPING 19   6.2   ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL IMPACTS DURING CONSTRUCTION PHASE 22   6.3   ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL IMPACTS DURING OPERATION PHASE 23   7.   ENVRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL MITIGATION MEASURES. 24   7.1   SITE LOCATION 24   7.2   MITIGATION MEASURES DURING CONSTRUCTION PHASE. 24   7.2   IMPACT MITIGATION DURING OPERATION PHASE 25   8.   ENVRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL MONITORING PLAN. 27   9.   ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL MANAGEMENT PLAN 29   10.   SOCIAL CONSULTATION 32   ANNEXES 33   ANNEX 1: PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE ORIGINALLY PROPOSED SITE LOCATION 33   ANNEX 2: MAP AND PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE NEW PROPOSED SITE FOR THE PROJECT 34   ANNEX 3: LAND TRANSFER AGREEMENT FOR THE NEW PROJECT SITE 35   ANNEX 4: ECOLOGICAL SURVEY 36   i Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ List of Tables No. Title Page Table 1 Summary of the Environmental and Social Management Plan (ESMP) during the 3 construction and operation phases of the Brum axel load station. Table 2 Environmental and Social Monitoring Plan. 5 Figure 2.1 Location map of the new and the old sites of the Brum axel load station project 6 Figure 2.2 Location map of the old site of the Brum axel load station project 6 Figure 2.3 Detailed location of the new site of the Brum Axel load station 7 Table 2.1 Main works during construction of the Brum axel load station. 7 Table 2.2 Estimated costs of the Brum axel station. 7 Figure 2.3 Design of the Brum axel load station 8 Figure 2.4 Design of the administrative building 9 Table 3.1 List of Major Laws/Decrees/Orders relevant to roads Projects 10 Table 3.2 List of Conventions and International Agreements that were ratified by Yemen 11 Table 3.3 World Bank Safeguard Policies Triggered for the Brum axel station project 12 Photo 4.1 View of the proposed new site location 13 Photo 4.2 View of the proposed old site location 13 Photo 4.3 Dense vegetation at the wadi1 km away from the proposed site and the sea shore 15 Photo 4.4 Dense vegetation of Prosopis juliflora at the mouth of the Wadi 15 Figure 4.1 Zoning Plan for the CZM, Bir Ali – Brum Area, Sector 2 17 Figure 6.1 Environmental and Social Impacts Screening and Scoping Matrix 20 Table 8.1 Environmental and Social Monitoring Plan during Construction Stage 28 Table 9.1 Summary of the Environmental and Social Management Plan during the construction 30 and operation phases of the Brum axel load station Table 10.1 Summary results of social consultations 32 ABBREVIATIONS CZM Coastal Zone Management EIA Environmental Impact Assessment EPC Environmental Protection Council EPL Environmental Protection Law ESMP Environmental and Social Management Plan MPA Marine Protected Area RAMP Road Asset Management Plan RMF Road Maintenance Fund RMFIU Road Maintenance Fund Implementation Unit ii Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ 1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Brum axel load station is located at the bottleneck points of the national road network to control moving vehicle loads. This should decrease damages to roads, improve roads conditions and increase its lifetime. This sub-project is part of the Road Maintenance Fund (RMF), financed under the 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 limited scale of the project and scope of works, the project is classified as category B (according to the WB OP 4.01). Brum axel load station is a small project (estimated cost of civil works is about 240,000 US$) located in a remote vacant area on Mukalla-Aden coastal main road in Hadramout Governorate. The original project site was located in a distance of about 5 km from Brum town and about 32.5 km from Mukalla city towards the west. The site was situated at the edge of wadi discharging to the sea (distance about 2 km) where the coast is proposed to be designated as Marine Protected Area (MPA). Following the recommendations of the Ecological Survey of the project area, the project site was moved by about 2 km West to minimize impacts on the coastal area. First, there are no major wadis near the new site running to the coastal area, as it was the case of the old project site. Second, the topography of the new project site is flat and wider than the originally proposed site and is also surrounded by some volcanic hills. Third, the new site is located about 7km to the south and 4km to the east and northeast to the Marine Protected Area (MPA). Moreover, there are chains of hills that separate the proposed new site from the coastal area. Therefore, no negative environmental or social impacts are anticipated if the mitigation measures that are included in this study are implemented. The project area is largely vacant land where only scattered settlements and low human activities exist. The ESMP document prepared for the new site location 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 were the main tools used during the preparation of this report. The project triggers also the OP 4.04 on Natural Habitats due to its proximity to the proposed MPA. Construction and implementation of this station may have minor negative short-term environmental and social impacts. The expected long-term positive impacts are very high due to the improved road conditions and long lifetime of roads. Keeping the current situation without axle load control may have many significant irreversible negative impacts on roads and socio-economic issues, such as: • Damages to roads, bridges and culverts. • Damages of vehicles. • Accidents due to difficulty to control overloaded vehicles, articulated type in particular. 1 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ An initial evaluation of the potential impacts associated with this project was carried out during screening and scoping phase. No major potential environmental impacts are expected, but only minor impacts associated with solid and liquid waste generation and storage, site preparation, earth works, traffic and safety. The potential negative impacts of attention are: • Generation, temporary storage and disposal of construction waste, and domestic waste from the labor camp. These may cause dust emissions, erosion, littering, damage to soil. • Contamination of soil and groundwater by stored fuel, lubricants, paints, and refueling of vehicles. • Increased level of noise and dust nuisance during the preparation of site, excavation, paving and trucking materials, as heavy machinery will be involved in the construction works. • Damage to the bird habitats and scaring off migratory birds due to elevated construction noise levels. • Safety of labor during the construction phase within the site and around it. The positive impacts of attention during the construction phase are the local employment opportunities, which offer the local community the chance to enhance their income level. The mitigation measures proposed to address the potential negative impacts of the project during the construction phase include: • Storage of fuel and lubricants in sealed containers. • Refueling of diesel and oil should be conducted only on sealed areas to avoid contamination. • Spraying of water during excavation, site preparation and paving works. • Restriction of earthworks during strong wind periods. • Restriction of use of noisy equipment to the daytime business hours. • Planting of trees and bushes around the project site. Environmental and social monitoring plan was prepared to specify monitoring arrangements, frequency and responsibilities. The plan will allow effective monitoring of the contractor’s performance against the environmental and social mitigation measures (see table 2). It is envisaged that the monitoring activities will be carried out by monitoring specialist that will devote about 25% of his time to monitoring compliance of the Brum weigh station with the ESMP. The expected monitoring costs of 4,000 USD will include also vehicle, fuel and camera. The summary ESMP Table 1, (including mitigation and monitoring measures) is presented below. The total cost of mitigation and monitoring measures are estimated to reach 7,000 USD. The team conducted also social consultations with local community through field interviews. The consultations reached 15 interviewees including car drivers, local council representative and the local citizens in the area. All interviewed people near the weigh station site stressed the benefits that will be achieved by the project. 2 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Table 1: Summary of the Environmental and Social Management Plan (ESMP) during the construction and operation phases of the Brum axel load station. Monitoring Cost [USD] Mitigation measures Cluster Impacts Responsibilities (mitigation and monitoring) Construction Phase Solid wastes of construction − Regular collection, temporary storage and materials such as plastics and & disposal of generated waste. metals may pollute the − Fuel and liquid wastes from machinery to environment near the site. be stored in sealed tanks to prevent Solid wastes such as debris leakages. are left (after completion of − Refueling and minor repairs should be Waste works) nearby the structures, undertaken in sealed areas. management on the existing habitat − Domestic solid waste should be stored in features. waste skips and regularly transferred and Disposal of oil and fuel and disposed off to a local dumpsite. spare parts on surrounding pasture land. Littering of the area by wind − Planting trees surrounding the site and RMF Land Soil erosion and visual appropriate plants inside. operation resources intrusion. − Restoration of vegetative cover. team under − Rehabilitation of disturbed sites. supervision Included in − Regular inspection of machinery and of RMF operational Noise pollution from the equipment used in construction to ensure headquarters. costs of RMF construction equipment and Air quality machinery. that they are in good working condition. and noise − Noisy construction works should be Dust emission during the restricted to daytime hours (6 am to 6 pm) construction works. − Water spraying for dust control Socio- Generation of local − Provision of work opportunities for the economics employment local community. − Adequate storage, removal and disposal of Coastal liquid and solid wastes. ecosystem, Negative impacts on bird − Restriction of noisy construction activities flora and habitats in the wadi mouth, to daytime hours. fauna especially on migratory birds. − Workers should avoid any interference with natural habitats. − Compliance with General Health, Safety, Accidents of the workers and Environment Regulations. Safety Reduced number of road − Traffic management, speed control, accidents warning signs, etc. Operation Phase − Oil should be stored in sealed containers. RMF Refueling and minor repairs should be operation Generation, storage and undertaken in sealed areas. Included in Waste team under disposal of solid and liquid − Domestic solid waste should be stored in operational management supervision of waste. waste skips and regularly transferred and costs of RMF RMF disposed off to a local dumpsite. headquarters. 3 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Land Soil erosion, and visual − Maintaining trees and plants surrounding resources intrusion the site. − Preparation and implementation of safety Safety and Risk of accidents involving plan for spillage or fire of hazardous traffic station staff, visitors and liquid substances. management traffic − Implementation of traffic management, speed control and warning signs. Increased longevity of the − Provision of adequate access roads and road surface, bridges and parking. Socio- culverts. − Strict application of administrative economics Reduced number of car regulations and procedures. accidents. − Re-vegetation and planting trees − Always keep site clean and free from Fauna and Disturbance to vegetation accumulated wastes. Flora and animals − Adequate storage, removal and disposal of liquid and solid wastes. Blockage of surface water − Adequate maintenance of existing surface Hydrology water drainage culverts. drainage 4 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Table 2: Environmental and Social Monitoring Plan (construction phase) Measurements Frequency Implementati Cost Indicator (incl. methods & equipment) on responsibility − Maintaining a record of solid and liquid waste Continuous: monthly − E&S specialist generation from construction, machinery and of the contract Solid and labor camp. engineer liquid waste − Temporary storage of constriction waste in - RMFIU collection, designated area agreed with the local community. storage and disposal − Storage of domestic waste in containers. - Final disposal of waste in designated area agreed with the local authority. − Site inspection and photographic documentation -Once before - Ditto Land soil of excavation, earthwork and land disturbing commencement erosion and activities. -Once during visual - Photographic documentation of planting and re- construction intrusion vegetation activities -Once after completion − Visual observation and photographic -Once during earth Ditto documentation of equipment induced emissions works. Dust and and dust clouds during excavation activities -Once during asphalt Noise - Site supervision/inspection and documentation to works. Cost of ensure the implementation of noise mitigation -On any complaint. hiring measures monitoring - Site inspection and documentation of community -Once before Ditto specialist activities and complaints nearby site. commencement (25% of time Socio- -Once during input), economic construction vehicle, fuel activities -Once after completion and camera. Follow the chance find procedures. In case of chance finds E&SU Equivalent of -Once during site Ditto USD 4,000 Vegetation - Site inspection and photographic documentation preparation and and animals of excavation and re-planting activities -Once during planting activities -Once before Ditto commencement - Site inspection and photographic documentation -Once during Coastal of intertidal zone. construction ecosystem - Bird counting -Once after completion - After local flooding (if any) - Check conditions of the surface water drainage - Once during Ditto Surface system. construction water Once after rain (if any) drainage Once after completion Accidents − Inspection and photographic documentation Continuous monthly Ditto and injuries - Checking records of injuries and accidents specifying cause and location 5 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ 2. OBJECTIVES AND DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT This report aims to identify the expected environmental and social impacts associated with the construction and operation of Brum axel load station – Hadramout governorate and preparation of the Environmental and Social Management Plan (ESMP) for both construction and operation phases. 2.1 Project description This project is composed of the construction and operation of Brum axel load station which is about 200m x 200m at the edge of Aden – Mukalla’ main asphalt road, at which most of trucks and tankers coming from Western governorates and going to Eastern governorates are passing by. Most of loading composed of various goods comes from Aden, Lahj, and Shabwa. The proposed sites (new and original location) are shown in the project location maps (Figures 2.1 and 2.2). Figure 2.1: Location map of the new and old sites of Brum axel load station project Figure 2.2: Location map of the old site of Brum axel load station project 6 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ It is important to note that the old site is replaced by the new site following the findings of the Ecological Survey. Firstly, there are no major wadis near the new site running to the coastal area, as it was the case with the old project site. Secondly, the topography of the new project site is flat and wider than the originally proposed site and is also surrounded by some volcanic hills. Third, the new site is located about 7km to the south and 4km to the east and northeast to the Marine Protected Area (MPA). Moreover, there are chains of hills that separate the proposed new site from the coastal area. Therefore, no negative environmental or social impacts are anticipated if the mitigation measures included in this study are implemented. This new proposed site location is shown in the specific project location map (Figures 2.3). Figure 2.3: Detailed location of the new site of Brum Axel Load Station Proposed construction works: Main required works for the construction of Brum axel load station include site preparation, sub- base, base and asphalt layer, installation of weigh bridge, construction of administration office building (Table 2.1). Table 2.1: Main works during construction of the Brum axel load station. S.N Description of Activities Unit Quantity 1 Unclassified Cut M3 2,500 2 Sub-Base Preparation M2 3,000 3 Base Course Preparation M3 2,400 4 Provide MC Layer M2 10,000 5 Asphalt Layer- 5cm Thick M3 320 6 Provide Yellow and White Paint L.M 2,000 7 Concrete Curbs 35cm high L.M. 2,000 8 Informative Signs (1.2x0.9m) with 2 Stands No. 4 9 Warning Signs (triangular shape) with 1 Stand No. 8 10 Concrete Pavement Layer 5cm Thick M2 2,000 11 Construction of Administration Office (12x3.3m) M2 40 7 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Estimated cost: The total cost of construction is estimated to be (240,000US$ for civil works and 100,000US$ for mechanical works). The breakdown of the above estimated cost is shown in table 2.2. Table 2.2: Estimated costs of the Brum axel station. Estimated cost Items US$ Site works 180,000 Construction works 60,000 Weighing installations 100,000 Total 340,000 Design drawings of the Brum axel station is presented in Figures 2.4 and 2.5 Figure 2.3: Design of the Brum axel load station 8 ‫)‪Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF‬‬ ‫‪Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP‬‬ ‫)‪Road Assets Management Project (RAMP‬‬ ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ ‫‪Figure 2.4: Design of the administrative building.‬‬ ‫‪9‬‬ Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ 3. Legal Framework 3.1 National Legal Framework The most relevant national laws related to road projects and environmental management are presented in table 3.1 below. Table 3.1: List of Major Laws/Decrees/Orders relevant to roads Projects Year Law No. Description Establishment of the Environment 1990 Decree of the Prime Minister 94 Protection Council (EPC). Adoption of the National Environmental 1995 Action Plan (NEAP) 1995 Law No.26 Protection of the Environment 2002 Law No.33 Water Law (9 chapters and 82 articles) 1991 Yemeni Constitution (articles 7, 18, 19 and 20) Land Acquisition and Private Property 2002 Civil Law (articles 118, 119 and 120) Land Acquisition and public ownership 1995 Law No. 21 State Land and Real Estate Law No.1 (Articles 12 – 16 on temporary acquisition, 1995 Articles 21, 27 provisions for land acquisition Land acquisition for the public interest Waqf Law no 23 year 1992 and 1992 The Republican Decree 99, 1996) Waqf/Endowment Land 1991 Civil Law, Articles 761, 765, 770, 1159) Agriculture Land The Environment Protection Law consists of five chapters and 95 articles. The law's objectives are to protect the environment, to combat pollution, and to protect natural resources, society, human health, and living beings from activities that damage the environment. In addition, the law is designed to protect the national environment from activities practiced beyond the national boundaries and to implement international commitments ratified by the Republic of Yemen in relation to environmental protection, control of pollution, conservation of natural resources, and the protection of such globally important environmental elements as the ozone layer and climatic changes. Also, the law specify the incorporation of environmental considerations in economic development plans at all levels and stages of planning for all sectors. It also, requires the preparation of environmental assessment for all projects proposed by government, public, private, and cooperative agencies, and foreign companies. No licenses are to be issued for projects that degrade the environment. However, there is as yet no regulatory framework to support the implementation of the Environment Protection Law and the provision of undertaking environmental assessment for projects is not enforced. The competent bodies for EIA defined in the EPL are those government bodies with powers under other legislation to approve development activities. The Environment Protection Council 10 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ (EPC) was given the responsibility of coordinating the activities of the competent bodies, and providing advice to them. In 2001 the Government transformed the EPC into the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA). Environmental standards and specifications have been prepared by the former EPC as annexes to the Executive Regulations, covering potable water quality, wastewater quality for agriculture, and ambient air quality, emissions, noise, biodiversity and protected areas. Yemen ratified a large number of International Environmental Agreements and Conventions; these are listed in table 3.2 below. Table 3.2: List of Conventions and International Agreements that were ratified by Yemen Ratification Date Name 1980 Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage Convention on the Control of Trans-boundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes 1992 and their Disposal 1995 Convention on Biological Diversity 1995 Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer 1995 Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer 1995 Convention on the Control of the Trans boundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal 1995 Framework Convention on Climate Change 1995 Convention on Biological Diversity 1996 United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification UNCCD 1997 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora 2002 The Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals 2004 Kyoto protocol (Framework Convention on Climate Change) 3.2 World Bank environmental and social safeguards and policies The World Bank has ten operational safeguard policies, which apply to various development projects that the Bank is either implementing or funding. The purpose of these policies is to ensure that social and environmental risks are prevented or at least minimized while increasing socio-economic benefits of approved projects in addition to preserving the environment. These policies have been a means to increase the effectiveness and positive impacts of development projects supported by the Bank. The World Bank Safeguard Policy triggered by the proposed Project is the Environmental Assessment OP 4.01. In addition, the OP 4.04 on Natural Habitats is triggered due to potential impacts of the project on the proposed Marine Protected Area. 11 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Table 3.3 World Bank Safeguard Policies Triggered for the Brum axel station project Policy Reference Applicability 1 Environmental Assessment OP 4.01 Yes 2 Involuntary Resettlement OP 4.12 No 3 Natural Habitats OP 4.04 Yes 4 Physical Cultural Resources OP 4.11 No 5 Pest Management OP 4.09 No 6 Indigenous Peoples OP 4.10 No 7 Forests OP 4.36 No 8 Safety of Dams OP 4.37 No 9 Projects in Disputed Areas OP 7.60 No 10 Projects on International Waterways OP 7.50 No The scope of works and the expected minor environmental and social impacts of the project allow classifying the project as category B under the Bank Safeguards Policy on Environmental Assessment OP 4.01. The Environmental Assessment takes into account the natural environment (air, water, and land); human health and safety; and social aspects (involuntary resettlement, physical cultural resources, etc.) in addition to trans-boundary and global environmental aspects. The land of the project new site was transferred on 8th of Dec., 2013 by the General Authority of Lands, Survey and Real Estate of Hadramout Branch Office to the RMF free of charge. The surrounding land is also owned by the government. The land is free from any squatters/encroachers and complies with the Bank Policy on Involuntary Resettlement. Accordingly, OP 4.12 is not triggered (see the land transfer agreement in Annex 3). 12 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ 4. ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL BASELINE CONDITIONS 4.1 Location and acquisition of land It is planned to construct the axel load station at 5 km West of Brum town – Hadramout governorate. It should be noted that the RMF acquired the land from the General Authority of Lands, Survey and Real Estate of Hadramout Branch Office on the 8th of Dec. 2013 as shown in Annex 3. Location and size are shown above on site layout (Figure 2.1). Aden-Mukalla’ asphalt main road New Project site location is adjacent to Aden-Mukalla’ asphalt main road Photo 4.1: View of the proposed new site locations Old Project site location is adjacent to Aden-Mukalla’ asphalt main road Aden-Mukalla’ asphalt main road Photo 4.2: View of the proposed old site location 13 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ 4.2 Topography The topography of the new project site is almost flat and wider than the original site. It is surrounded by some volcanic hills (see Photo 4.1). Soils within the project area consist of coarse sand to gravel. There is a wadi about 1km north of the project site. It is running westwards to the coast. Another wadi is located 3-4 km SW of the site. Ground level is nearly 1.5m below the road level. 4.3 Roads and Traffic Brum station is located beside Mukalla-Aden road after Brum town, where medium traffic volumes between East and West regions are passing by. 4.4 Climate The weather on the project area is relatively variable throughout the year. Hot and humid weather with mostly mild and little precipitation in the area is prevalent during the summer. The highlands are markedly cooler than the coastal plain. Temperature reaches 36° C in the coastal areas, due to seasonal winds saturated with moisture. The temperature in winter tends to be moderate in the area, about 20-24 °C. Rainfall distribution is typically bimodal with about 80% of rainfall recorded between July and September. The average annual rainfall is 50 mm. A few times a year Hadramaut experiences heavy rainfall that may result in significant flooding. 4.5 Air Quality The overall air quality in proposed project is good. The primary air contaminant on the Brum axel load station project site is particulate matter, which is naturally occurring from the loose surface soil and gets suspended in the air due to the overland wind and sea breeze. 4.6 Hydrology Due to the low precipitation and the harsh climatic conditions in the project area and its surrounding areas, there are no above ground fresh water resources in the area. There is no rain gauge station installed in the area that would provide seasonal rainfall information. There are two wadis 1km north, and 3-4km southwest of the project site. They fill up for a short time during sporadic heavy rains. 4.7 Noise There are no sources or noise pollution in the project area other then road traffic. Present noise levels near the site are well within the acceptable limits and do not exceed 50 decibels. 4.8 Terrestrial Habitats The site selected for the implementation of the axel load station project has little natural flora and the majority of the plants at the site are low shrubs. Among the various vegetation types found in the project site are Al Harmal (Rhazya stricta) and some trees of Al Sumar (Acacia tortilis). In addition, the species of Aerva javanica, Lavandula angustifolia, Senna acutifolia and Cleome droserifolia were also observed in low numbers at the project site. The vegetation in the wadi situated north of the new project site is dominated by Al Sisaban tree (Prosopis juliflora) followed by Acacia tortilis and some of date Palm trees. Inside the wadi and 1 km away from the shore a dense vegetation zone is dominated by Prosopis juliflora, and some of Palm trees (photo 4.3). 14 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Photo 4.3: Dense vegetation at the wadi 1km away from the proposed site and the sea shore At the mouth of the wadi near the coast a dense vegetation zone is dominated by Prosopis juliflora was observed (Photo 4.4). Photo 4.4: Dense vegetation of Prosopis juliflora at the mouth of the Wadi 4.9 Coastal and Marine Habitat The coastal and intertidal zone located 4 km east and northeast from the new project site consists of sandy beaches and rocky shores. No mangroves or sea grasses were found. Based on the consulted institutions (i.e. Faculty of Environment & Marine Sciences-Hadramout University and Environment Protection Authority-branch of Mukalla), there is only one type of turtles called Green Turtle (Chelonia Mydas). According to the fishermen and the local communities of the area, some these turtles may occur in the beach during nighttime (see Annex 4). 15 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ The coastal area and the intertidal zone are free of any type of mangrove trees because the conditions within this area, specially the substrate, are not suitable for mangroves growth. The dense vegetation of Prosopis juliflora in the coastal area appears to be a resting, feeding, and breeding area for resident and migratory shore birds. The little white egret (Egretta garzetta) - one of the sea birds, was observed during the ecological survey near the coast. The area extending from Balhaf to Brum is characterized by extensive fringing coral reefs and rich fishing sites. The reef is considered to be in good condition according to the findings of the ecological survey (see Annex 4). 4.10 The proposed Balhaf-Brum Marine Protected Area (BBMPA) Over the past few years, conservation efforts of the Yemeni biological resources have focused primarily on the establishment of protected areas. These efforts have led to the identification of 15 areas throughout the country including Balhaf - Brum area. The area extending from Belhaf to Brum, qualified as an area of regional importance, was identified and proposed to become a Marine Protected Area (MPA) of Yemen. This coastal area, which is located in the eastern Gulf of Aden is characterized by extensive fringing coral reefs and rich fishing sites, and it is considered as an important site for nesting of seabirds and marine turtles. The Balhaf - Brum coastal and marine environment is both diverse and attractive from its rocky and sandy coasts to the saline mud flats, mangrove swamps, coral reefs and sea grass beds. This potential MPA is now part of the proposed Zoning Plan for the Coastal Zone Management (CZM), Bir Ali – Brum area, which comprises several zone categories of protected status along more than 50 km of coastline and a group of high aspect islands with extensive fringing coral reefs, rich fishing areas, seabird and, to the East of Bir Ali, marine turtle nesting sites and a salt water crater with fringing mangroves. Although the project of Brum axel load station is not located within this sensitive area, the coastal zone is about 4 km east and northeast of the new project site is considered to be part of the proposed Marine Protected Area (see Annex 4). It is to be noted that this proposed MPA is extending over a distance of 125 km from Bir Ali in Shabwa Governorate to Brum in Hadhramout Governorate. It also includes the islands of Hallaniyah, Baraqa, Sikha, Ghadreen Al Kubra and Ghadreen Al Sughra. According to the Zoning Plan for the Coastal Zone Management (CZM) Bir Ali – Brum area, this area is defined as a General Use Zone (GUZ). The least restrictive in terms of economic activity (see Figure 4.1). 16 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Figure 4.1: Zoning Plan for the CZM, Bir Ali – Brum Area, Sector 2 4.11 Socio-economic The new project site is located within the Directorate of Brum, one of the districts of Hadramout governorate. According to administrative division in the Republic of Yemen and thus the population of the district of Brum are considered direct beneficiaries from the establishment of the project. The district population is (20,040) people according to the 2004 census projected for the year 2013. The project is located on important link between western and eastern provinces. Residents of Aden, Lahj, Abian, Shabwa and Hadramout governorates are all indirect beneficiaries. Brum axle load station is located at remote area where only scattered settlements and low human activities exist. The land is mostly used for grazing and fisheries. No resettlement is required. 17 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ 5. ANALYSIS OF PROJECT ALTERNATIVES The aim of this analysis is to choose the best alternative based by comparing feasible different alternatives. The alternative scenarios compared in this chapter are the “no-project”, location “A” & location “B” as shown below. 5.1 “No-project” Alternative This alternative assumes that the present situation would pertain. This means that no axel load station would be constructed and there would be no control to moving vehicle loads at this bottleneck point of the national road network. This means that the road network would be vulnerable to increasing damages, roads conditions would deteriorate and roads lifetime would significantly decrease. Construction and implementation of this station may have minor short- term environmental and social negative impacts, but the expected long-term positive impacts are very high due to the improved road conditions and long lifetime of roads. Keeping the current situation without axle load control may have many significant irreversible negative impacts on roads and socio-economic issues, such as: • Damages to roads, bridges and culverts. • Damages of vehicles. • Accidents due to difficulty to control overloaded vehicles, articulated type in particular. 5.2 Location “A” This location was originally proposed to be used for constructing the axel load station. This location is only 50m from the wadi discharging to the sea, and 2km from the coast. The ecological survey that was conducted indicated clearly that constructing the station at this site would allow easy pathway of pollution to the costal ecosystem. These potential negative impacts in this case might include siltation of water, hydrocarbon pollution in the wadi mouth during sporadic local floods. This could cause dye out of coral reefs and negative impacts on species that depend on coral habitats. Hence, the main recommendation from the ecological survey was to shift the project site to new location. 5.3 Location “B” This site is located in a remote vacant area on Mukalla-Aden coastal road in Hadramout Governorate, with a distance of about 5 km from Brum town and about 32.5 km from Mukalla city towards the west. It is about 2 km from site “A” towards the west where there nearest wadi is located about 2km SW from the site, and there are no hydrological pathways leading to it. An actual evaluation of the potential impacts associated with this project was carried out during the second survey, which was conducted by the RMF-national environmental & social consultant and social specialist. No major potential environmental impacts are expected, but only minor impacts associated with solid and liquid waste generation and storage, site preparation, earth works, traffic and safety. Following the mitigation measures proposed in this assessment would result in avoiding/mitigating the identified potential negative environmental impacts. 18 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ 6. POTENTIAL ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL IMPACTS 6.1 Impact Scoping An initial evaluation of potential impacts associated with this project was carried out for the old site during the scoping phase through using a checklist shown below. Similarly, scoping of the potential impacts was done for the new site. A second survey was conducted during which all terrestrial and marine ecological aspects and information were checked and confirmed through the consultation of concerned institutions (i.e. Faculty of Environment & Marine Sciences- Hadramout University and Environment Protection Authority-branch of Mukalla). This checklist contains all possible potential impacts associated with Brum axel load project, divided into groups based on general environmental and social aspects, which may arise from this project. The expected negative social and environmental impacts associated with the construction works of the Brum axle load station are minor, localized, insignificant and reversible. Whereas, keeping current situation with uncontrolled moving axle load, there will be many significant irreversible negative impacts on roads and socio-economic issues, such as: • Damages to road, bridges and culverts. • Damages of vehicles. • Accidents due to difficulty to control over loaded vehicles, articulated type in particular. The scoping matrix is presented in Figure 6.1. 19 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Road Name : Road Length: POTENTIAL IMPACT CHARACTERISTICS Type Effect Change Extent Degree ASPECT Item No. PHASE POTENTIAL IMPACTS Uncertain (to be determined) Major& Irreversible Minor & reversible Major & reversible Temporary Negligible Permanent Extensive Localized Negative Positive Indirect Direct A-1.1 Site survey investigation A-1.2 Permament Land Acquisition A-1.2.1 Widening A-1.2.2 Pinch Point A-1.2.3 Local Re-Alignment / New Alignment A-1.2.4 Dumping Sites A-1.3 Temporary Land Acquisition A1- Design / Construction A-1.3.1 Site Compound x A-1.3.2 Diversion and Haul Road x A-1.4 Slope Stabilization LAND RESOURCES A-1.5 Management of Costruction Site Compound x x x x x A-1.5.1 Solid and Liquid Waste Disposal Management and Safety Plan for Petrolum A-1.5.2 Products and Paving Material A-1.5.3 Safety And Emergency Responce Procedures A-1.5.4 Living and Sanitation Facilities A-1.5.5 Rehabilitation of Site A-1.6 Disposal of Cut Material and Surplus Fill x x x x x A-1.7 Borrow Pits and Quarry Areas x B- 1.1 Slope Stabilization B1 - Operation Agricultural Land or Terrace Damage During B- 1.2 Maintenance Maintenance Contractor Site Compound, Material and B- 1.3 Equipment Storage B- 1.4 Management of Induced Development A-2.1 Sources of Construction water x Pollution from Wastewater,Diesel or Asphalt Spills from A-2.2 x x x x x Site Compound and Machinary A-2.3 Flood Protection in Wadi A2 - Design / Construction A-2.4 Alteration of Water Harvesting Patterns HYDROLOGY AND WATER RESOURCES A-2.5 Cross Drainage and Scour Effects A-2.6 Discharge to Adjacent Lands: A-2.6.1 Discharge to Unstable Slopes A-2.6.2 Discharge to Rock Surface A-2.6.3 Discharge to Channel in a Stack A-2.6.4 Discharge to Graveyards A-2.6.5 Discharge to Terraces Discharge to Other Sensitive Areas or A-2.6.6 Structures B-2.1 Water Harvesting Blockage of Cross Draiange / Culverts from Uncontrlled B2 - Operation B-2.2 Discharged 20 HYDROLOGY AND WATE Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ B-2.1 Water Harvesting Blockage of Cross Draiange / Culverts from Uncontrlled B2 - Operation B-2.2 Discharged B-2.3 Erosion of Road Platform from Drainage Discharge Pollution from Vehicles Diesel and Oil Spills or B-2.4 Accidents with Hazardous Cargo Dust & Potenial Pollution from Construction Machinary, AIR QUALITY AND NOISE A-3.1 x Construction A3 - Design / Stored Materials and Spoil Heaps A-3.2 Smoke from Burning of Waste Materials NUISANCE A-3.3 Noise Nuisance x Operation B-3.1 Air Pollution from Increased Traffic B3 - B-3.2 Noise Nuisance Conversion or Degradation of a Critical or non-Citical A-4.1 x x x x x Natural Habitats Construction A4 - Design / BIOLOGIC RESOURSES Damage to Biological Resources by Construction A-4.2 x Equipment Damage to Biological Resources by Construction A-4.3 x Workers Increased Pressure on Biological Resources from B-4.1 x Operation Induced Development B4 - B-4.1.1 Animal Road Kill B-4.1.2 Destruction of Vegetation A-5.1 Tribal Tensions A-5.2 Land Acquisition and Resettlement Destruction or Re-Location of Utility Services (Electricity A-5.3 and Phone Pole Lines, Water Pipes) A-5.4 Public Health and Safety at Construction Site A5 - Design / Construction Safety and Health for the Constuction A-5.4.1 x x x x x Workers SOCIO-ECONOMIC AND CULTURAL Public Safety at the Site and Interaction A-5.4.2 x x x x x between the Workers and the Public A-5.5 Road Closure and Detours A-5.6 Graveyards and Burials A-5.7 Known Archaeological and Historic Sites Chance Finds of Cultural Resources or Other Socio- A-5.8 Economics Resources A-5.9 Gender Considerations A-5.10 Employment B-5.1 Increased Road Accidents x B-5.2 Public Health and Safety x B5 - Operation B-5.2.1 Works Site Risks to Workers and the Public x Health Risks from Compound Sanitation and B-5.2.2 x Communicable Diseases B-5.3 Socio-Economic Benefits x Chance Finds of Cultural Resources or Other Socio- B-5.4 Economics Resources Figure 6.1: Project Environmental and Social Impacts Screening and Scoping Matrix 21 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ 6.2 Environmental and social impacts during construction phase 6.2.1 Land resources The principal concerns during construction are related to soil erosion and visual quality, which can be associated with earthworks. The issue of soil erosion is particularly important during sporadic heavy rains. 6.2.2 Safety and Traffic Management Safety hazard is expected during construction phase from traffic accidents in the main road. In addition to accidents and injuries from construction activities to workers, visitors and local community. 6.2.3 Noise Pollution Noise emissions by heavy machinery during the construction phase of the project may temporarily impact birds in the area surrounding the project site. This impact is temporary. 6.2.4 Waste management Construction of axle load stations will inevitably result in the generation of construction, soil, and asphaltic waste. Improper disposal of wastes from works can potentially lead to contamination of soils, watercourses and visual quality. Solid waste (including domestic waste from the labour camp), construction debris and unused buildings materials scattered all over the compound may pollute the environment near the site. 6.2.5 Fauna and Flora Construction of Brum axel load station may have adverse impacts on biological resources in particular on local habitats. These impacts are associated with noise emissions and dust generation by site disturbance, soil erosion caused by earth works, storage and disposal of waste, paving; leakage of hydrocarbons from storage of diesel/oils, and workers’ behavior. However, due to the limited vegetation cover, scope of works and volume of potentially harmful liquids (fuel, lubricants) stored, these impacts are minor and reversible. 6.2.6 Coastal ecosystem The key sea pollutants originating from the Brum axel load station project include liquid wastes (particularly hydrocarbons), solid waste, and construction noise. The new proposed location of Brum axel load station project is about 5 km far from the Proposed Marine Protected Area and the sea coast, whereas the distance from the site to the nearest point in the sea coast more than 2.5 km. Also there are chains of hills separate the proposed new site from the coastal area and there are no any major wadis near the site running to the coastal area. Hence, endangered, rare and protected species such as green sea turtles and coral reefs, which were identified in the marine environment, will not be affected during the construction of this project. 6.2.7 Hydrology The main issue is related to blockage of drainage culvert during rainy days. This may lead to soil erosion and damages to road body. However, the very limited size and scope of work, and the lack of agricultural activities near the project site render this impact negligible. The volume 22 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ of fuel and oil involved in the project is small, and the impact is evaluated as minor The contractor must prevent any erosion into the beach from the project site. 6.2.8 Socio-economic The project would have many positive economic impacts such as: • Provide jobs during the construction and operation phases. • Improving economic conditions and the recreation of trade in the region, which will have a positive impact on the living conditions of the drivers and the people of the region. Expected negative social impacts associated with project are negligible. Many positive socio- economic impacts are expected. Site consultation with truck drivers, and representatives of local social shows good satisfaction with the construction and implementations of the axel load station. 6.3 Environmental and social impacts during operation phase 6.3.1 Land resources The main issue is erosion of soil by surface water during sporadic heavy rains. 6.3.2 Safety and Traffic Management Safety hazard is expected during operation phase from the traffic accidents at inlet and outlet intersections with the main road. 6.3.3 Waste management The expected types of waste generation during operation phase of axel load station are domestic wastes. If not properly managed and stored, strong winds may lead to littering of the project area. 6.3.4 Fauna and Flora Operation of this axel load station may have negligible impacts on terrestrial ecosystem. These impacts are associated with site disturbance, earth works, storage of diesel/oils, leaks the oil from vehicles/equipment and/or oil spill, waste management and worker behavior. Moreover, these impacts are minor and reversible. On the other hand, most species identified within the terrestrial study area including Prosopis juliflora are not endemic to the area and are no endangered, rare or protected. 6.3.5 Hydrology The main issue is related to blockage of drainage culvert during rainy days. This may lead to soil erosion and damages to the road body. 6.3.6 Socio-economic The project would have positive economic impacts such as: • Decrease of accidents resulting from the heavy load transport vehicles. • Improve the traffic situation and reduce pollution. 23 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ 7. ENVRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL MITIGATION MEASURES. 7.1 Site location The key mitigation measures address the potential impacts of the proposed projects. The site of the project has already been shifted to new location, 2 km away from the originally proposed site toward the south addressing the key mitigation measure set in the Ecological Survey. The advantages of the new proposed project site are: • Twice longer distance between the project site and the coastal ecosystem (4-5km). • Absence of wadis and hence no pathway for pollution by sporadic local floods from the project site to the coast. Plot of land located 1 km west of the initially proposed project site can be used for the project purpose, as it is state owned. The new site has very similar environmental baseline conditions compared to the originally proposed site including flat terrain, climate, air quality, vegetation cover and type of fauna. 7.2 Mitigation measures during construction phase. 7.2.1 Waste management The Contractor, under the contract engineer monitoring, and the RMFIU supervision, should maintain clean work environment and leave site clean after completion. The Contractor should prepare waste management plan for both solid and liquid wastes expected from construction and domestic sources (labor camp). He should provide sanitary facilities and waste containers. Liquid wastes and oils from machinery to be stored in tanks and removed from the site. Construction wastes to be stored properly and removed to the approved dumping site. 7.2.2 Land resources The Contractor, under the contract engineer monitoring, and the RMFIU supervision, should take necessary actions to avoid excessive soil erosion, such as: • Import soil from authorized borrow-pit. • Maintain earth work and open cuts wet. • Re-vegetation and avoiding damages to existing plants. • Provide adequate drainage works. 7.2.3 Air quality and noise The contractor under the monitoring of the environmental and social specialist should conduct regular water spraying during earth works conducted at times of strong winds, and regular inspection of construction equipment and machinery to ensure their good working conditions. Noisy construction activities should be conduced during daytime hours to reduce noise impact on the bird habitats in the nearby wadi. 24 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ 7.2.4 Socio-economic The contractor, under RMFIU supervision, should maintain good cooperative relation with local community. He should provide work opportunities to local work forces; manage behavior of his workers (including in the workers’ camp) and avoiding creation problems of any kind with the local community. 7.2.5 Coastal ecosystem, Fauna and Flora The contractor, under RMFIU supervision, should avoid intrusion with natural biodiversity. He should manage work compound and workers behavior properly and avoiding damages to biological habitat. Oil and fuel should be stored in sealed containers. Refueling and small repairs should be conducted in paved and sealed areas. The contractor should always keep the site clean. He should provide adequate storage containers for solid wastes. All wastes should be collected and disposed to remote approved sites. Noise construction activities should be conducted during daytime hours (6am to 6pm) to reduce any potential impact on the bird in the areas surrounding the project. 7.2.6 Hydrology The contractor, under RMFIU supervision, should maintain adequate drainage of surface water from construction site and road culverts. 7.2.7 Safety and Traffic Management The Contractor, under the contract engineer monitoring, and the RMFIU supervision, should ensure safety of his workers, visitors and local community. Safety problems should be avoided or at least minimized to acceptable level through using design and traffic management techniques. Safety hazards are expected from construction activities, and due to traffic accidents. Main safety measures are: • Preparation and implementation of safety plan, including emergency action plan. • Preparation and implementation of traffic management plan inside construction site and at access points at the intersection with main roads. • Installation of traffic warning signs on the main road such as “Work Area” and “Speed Limit”. 7.3 Impact mitigation during operation phase 7.3.1 Waste management Axel load operation team, under RMF supervision, should maintain clean work environment with improved visual quality. Both solid and liquid wastes are expected from vehicles and domestic sources. Adequate storage containers should be provided for both liquid and solid wastes. All wastes should be collected and disposed to remote approved sites. 7.3.2 Land resources Axel load operation team, under RMF supervision, should take necessary actions to avoid excessive soil erosion, such as: 25 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ • Vegetation and avoiding damages to existing plants. • Provide adequate drainage to site. 7.3.3 Safety and Traffic Management Axel load operation team, under RMF supervision, should ensure safety of workers, visitors and local community. Safety hazards are expected due to traffic accidents. Main safety measures are: • Preparation and implementation of safety plan, including emergency action plan for spillage or fire to hazardous liquid substances. • Preparation and implementation of traffic management plan and provision of necessary safety and warning techniques at access points. • Installation of traffic warning sign on the main road such as the “Reduce Speed” sign. 7.3.4 Socio-economic Axel load operation team should maintain good cooperation relations with local community. RMF should provide work opportunities to local people and ensure that axel load station is conducting its role in controlling loads. 7.3.5 Fauna and Flora Axel load operation team, under RMF supervision, should avoid intrusion with biodiversity. The mitigation measures include re-vegetation and tree planting, adequate storage, removal and disposal of liquid and solid waste. 7.3.6 Hydrology Axel load operation team, under RMF supervision, should maintain unblocked drainage of surface water from work site, and maintain existing drainage structures. 26 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ 8. ENVRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL MONITORING PLAN. The monitoring activities will be the responsibility of the environmental and social specialist of the contract engineer who will be supervised and supported by the project’s implementation unit. The monitoring activities aim to ensure project compliance during the construction phase with the mitigation measures stipulated in the ESMP. Monitoring activities will rely primarily on field observations, feedback from stakeholders and other affected people, contractor’s documentation and their perception of the adequacy of the mitigation measures. Photographic documentation will be also required. Table 8.1 presents Monitoring Plan, which specifies indicators, monitoring activities, frequency, responsibilities and costs. It should be noted that after each inspection, a report should be compiled (location and activity specific) by the environmental and social specialist. This shall identify areas of contractor’s non- compliance with the ESMP and provide guiding remarks on actions to be taken. The significance of the non-compliance shall also be noted. The E&S specialist shall prepare these reports and follow-up with the contractor‘s compliance with the ESMP or otherwise corrective actions should be taken. It is envisaged that the monitoring activities will be carried out by monitoring specialist that will devote about 25% of his time to monitoring compliance of Brum weigh station with the ESMP. The expected costs monitoring costs will include also vehicle, fuel and camera. They are expected to reach about USD 4,000 (Table 8.1). Summary of General Monitoring activities applicable to the Environmental and Social Management Plan during construction of Brum axel load station. 27 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Table 8.1: Environmental and Social Monitoring Plan during Construction Stage Measurements Frequency Implementation Cost Indicator (incl. methods & equipment) responsibility − Maintaining a record of solid and liquid waste Continuous: − E&S specialist of generation from construction, machinery and monthly the contract Solid and labor camp. engineer liquid waste − Temporary storage of constriction waste in - RMFIU collection, designated area agreed with the local community. storage and disposal − Storage of domestic waste in containers. - Final disposal of waste in designated area agreed with the local authority. − Site inspection and photographic documentation -Once before - Ditto Land soil of excavation, earthwork and land disturbing commencement erosion and activities. -Once during visual - Photographic documentation of planting and re- construction intrusion vegetation activities -Once after completion − Visual observation and photographic -Once during earth Ditto documentation of equipment induced emissions works. Dust and and dust clouds during excavation activities -Once during asphalt Cost of Noise - Site supervision/inspection and documentation to works. hiring ensure the implementation of noise mitigation -On any complaint. monitoring measures specialist - Site inspection, documentation of the nearest -Once before Ditto (25% of time community complaints. commencement input), -Once during vehicle, fuel Socio- construction and camera. economic -Once after Equivalent of activities completion USD 4,000 In case of chance E&SU Follow the chance find procedures. finds -Once during site Ditto Vegetation - Site inspection and photographic documentation preparation and animals of excavation and re-planting activities -Once during planting activities -Once before Ditto commencement -Once during - Site inspection and photographic documentation Coastal construction of the wadi and wadi mouth and intertidal zone. ecosystem -Once after - Bird counting completion - After local flooding (if any) Accidents − Inspection and photographic documentation Continuous monthly Ditto and injuries - Checking records of injuries and accidents specifying cause and location 28 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ 9. ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL MANAGEMENT PLAN The environmental and social management plan summarizes findings of this report (Table 9.1). It consists of the following main components: • Environmental and social mitigation measures. • Environmental and social monitoring plan. • Reporting. The Contractor is responsible for the construction works in full compliance with the ESMP. Environmental and social monitoring during the construction phase will be conducted by monitoring specialist of the Contract Engineer. The RMFIU is responsible for supervision of the implementation and monitoring of the mitigation measures during construction phase in compliance with the ESMP. The RMF is responsible for the implementation and monitoring of the mitigation measures during operation phase. The Mitigation Measures applicable to the Environmental and Social Management Plans during construction and operation shown in Table 9.1. The expected total cost of the ESMP is 7,000 USD. 29 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Table 9.1: Summary of the Environmental and Social Management Plan during the construction and operation phases of the Brum axel load station Monitoring Cost [USD] Mitigation measures Cluster Impacts Responsibilities (mitigation and monitoring) Construction Phase Solid wastes of construction − Regular collection, temporary storage materials such as plastics and and & disposal of generated waste. metals may pollute the − Fuel and liquid wastes from machinery to environment near the site. be stored in sealed tanks to prevent Solid wastes such as debris leakages. Waste are left (after completion of − Refueling and minor repairs should be management works) nearby the structures, undertaken in sealed areas. on the existing habitat. − Domestic solid waste should be stored in Disposal of oil and fuel and waste skips and regularly transferred and spare parts on the disposed off to a local dumpsite. surrounding pasture land. Littering of the area by wind. − Planting trees surrounding the site and Land Soil erosion and visual appropriate plants inside. resources intrusion. − Restoration of vegetative cover. RMF operation − Rehabilitation of disturbed sites. team under supervision of Included in − Regular inspection of machinery and RMF operational Noise pollution from the equipment used in construction to ensure headquarters. costs of construction equipment and that they are in good working condition. Air quality RMF machinery. − Noisy construction works should be and noise Dust emission during the restricted to daytime hours (6 am to 6 construction works. pm) − Water spraying for dust control Socio- Generation of local − Provision of work opportunities for the economics employment local community. − Adequate storage, removal and disposal Coastal of liquid and solid wastes. ecosystem, Negative impacts on bird − Restriction of noisy construction flora and habitats in the wadi mouth, activities to daytime hours. fauna especially on migratory birds. − Workers should avoid any interference with natural habitats. − Compliance with General Health, Safety, Accidents of the workers and Environment Regulations. Safety Reduced number of road − Traffic management, speed control, accidents warning signs, etc. Operation Phase − Oil should be stored in sealed containers. Refueling and minor repairs should be RMF operation Generation, storage and team under Included in Waste undertaken in sealed areas. disposal of solid and liquid supervision of operational management − Domestic solid waste should be stored in waste. RMF costs of RMF waste skips and regularly transferred and headquarters. disposed off to a local dumpsite. 30 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Land Soil erosion, and visual − Planting trees and plants surrounding the resources intrusion site. − Preparation and implementation of Safety and Risk of accidents involving safety plan for spillage or fire of traffic station staff, visitors and hazardous liquid substances. management traffic − Implementation of traffic management, speed control and warning signs. Increased longevity of the − Provision of adequate access roads and road surface, bridges and parking. Socio- culverts. − Strict application of administrative economics Reduced number of car regulations and procedures. accidents. − Re-vegetation and planting trees − Always keep site clean and free from Fauna and Vegetation, animals accumulated wastes. Flora − Adequate storage, removal and disposal of liquid and solid wastes. − Adequate maintenance of existing Hydrology Surface water drainage surface water drainage culverts. 31 Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF) Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ 10. SOCIAL CONSULTATION The team conducted social consultations with local community through field interviews. The consultations reached 15 interviews including car drivers, local council representative and the local citizens in the area. All interviewed people near the weigh station site stressed the benefits that will be achieved by the project. The results of the interview are shown in the table below. Table 10.1 Summary results of social consultations Statement Large Medium Weak Maintaining the infrastructure of the road 75% 15% 10% Maintain vehicles from overloading 80% 15% 5% Revitalization of commercial business 75% 10% 15% Create business opportunities by opening new shops in the area 65% 15% 20% The findings of the consultations showed that: • 75% of the people are in favor of implementing the project; • 80% of the people are in favor of controlling the overloaded freight trucks; • 75% of the people think that the project will revitalize the commercial business; and • 65% of the people believe that the project will induce new shops in the area 32 ‫)‪Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF‬‬ ‫‪Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP‬‬ ‫)‪Road Assets Management Project (RAMP‬‬ ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ ‫‪ANNEXES‬‬ ‫‪Annex 1: Photographs of the originally proposed site location‬‬ ‫‪Brum axel load station proposed site‬‬ ‫‪33‬‬ ‫)‪Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF‬‬ ‫‪Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP‬‬ ‫)‪Road Assets Management Project (RAMP‬‬ ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ ‫‪Consultation with community and affected people‬‬ ‫‪Annex 2: Map and photographs of the new proposed site for the Project‬‬ ‫‪Aden-Mukalla main‬‬ ‫‪asphalt road‬‬ ‫‪Aden-Mukalla main‬‬ ‫‪asphalt road‬‬ ‫‪Proposed new site location‬‬ ‫‪34‬‬ ‫)‪Road Maintenance Fund ( RMF‬‬ ‫‪Sub-Project (3) : Brum Axle Weigh Stations ESMP‬‬ ‫)‪Road Assets Management Project (RAMP‬‬ ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ ‫‪Annex 3: Land Transfer Agreement for the new project site‬‬ ‫‪35‬‬ Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project Annex 4: Ecological Survey Ecological Baseline Survey for the Brum Axel Load Station Project Prepared by: Dr. Abdulsalam Alkawri Environmental and Marine Biological Consultant alkawri@gmail.com November 2014 36 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project TABLE OF CONTENTS EXECUTIVE SUMMARY …………………………………………….. 38 1 PROJECT DESCRIPTION…………………………………………… 40 1.1 Background………………………………………………………... 40 1.2 Project Objectives …………………………………………………… 40 2 STUDY METHODOLOGY ……………………………………………. 41 2.1 Literature Review………………………………………………... 41 2.2 Field Work ……………………………………………………… 41 2.3 Post Field Work and Reporting…….…………………………… 42 3 LEGAL AND INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK …………………. 43 3.1 World Bank Safeguard Policies……………………………………. 43 3.2 Applicable Yemeni Environmental Regulations…………………… 43 3.2.1 National Laws …………………………………………….. 43 3.2.2 International Agreements ………………………………… 44 4 ENVIRONMENTAL BASELINE CONDITIONS……………............ 46 4.1 Bahlaf -Brum Marine Protected Area ……………………………... 46 4.2 Location and site description……………………………………….. 48 4.3 Topography and Geology …………………………………………. 49 4.4 Climate……………………………………………………………… 50 4.5 Air Quality………………………………………………………….. 50 4.6 Hydrology………………………………………………………….. 50 4.7 Noise………………………………………………………………... 51 4.8 Biological Diversity ………………………………………………… 51 4.8.1 Terrestrial Habitat …………………………………………. 51 4.8.2 Coastal and Marine Habitat………………………………… 53 5 ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS DURING CONSTRUCTION AND OPERATION PHASES………………………………………………… 56 6 MITIGATION MEASURES …………………………………………... 58 REFERENCES………….………………………………………………... 59 ANNEX 1 List of Institutions and Persons Consulted………………….... 60 ANNEX 2 Photographs of the original site…………………...………….. 61 ANNEX 3 Detailed findings fro the project site and the coastal area…..... 62 ANNEX 4 Photographs of the new proposed project site………………... 63 ANNEX 5 Progress Report.............……………………………………..... 64 37 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Brum axel load station is a very small project located in a remote vacant area on Mukalla- Aden coastal road in Hadramout Governorate, west of Brum town. The coastal area extending from Belhaf to Brum, qualified as an area of regional importance, was identified and proposed to become a Marine Protected Area (MPA) of Yemen. The project of Brum axel load station is not located within this sensitive area, but the coastal zone is about 2 km east of the project site is considered to be a part of the proposed Marine Protected Area. Location of the wadi very near the project site (about 50m), with its mouth within or at the edge of the proposed Marine Protected Area (MPA) raises concerns about the potential pollution of the coastal zone. In this regards, the ecological baseline survey aims to provide adequate and accurate ecological baseline information for the ESMP. The survey results indicated that the project site has low species diversity, but the wadi, which is located near the project site and the coastal area has a dense vegetation zone. Among the various vegetation types found are some trees of Al Sumar (Acacia tortilis), Al Sisaban trees (Prosopis juliflora), Al Harmal (Rhazya stricta) and some date ‘Palm trees. The survey results also indicated that the sensitive plants of mangrove were not present within the coastal area nor in the Intertidal Zone. Sea turtles were not seen at the beach during the first coastal survey and no evidence of nesting on the shore was found. However, during the second coastal survey (conducted by the RMF environmental & social consultant), it was found that the sandy beach is used by the green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) for nesting as reported ensured by the local community and by the consulted institutions (the Faculty of Environment & Marine Sciences of the Hadramout University, and the Environment Protection Authority – the Mukalla branch): see Annex 5. The key impacts of the project in the original location on the proposed MPA include: • Washing the solid waste by occasional runoff water from heavy rains down the wadi to the sea (construction and operation phases). • Transportation of oils from oil spillages by rainwater to the wadi and subsequently to the sea coast (construction and operation phases). • Noise from the site equipment and machinery (construction and operation phases). The key proposed mitigation measure to minimize the damages to marine habitats is to shift the project site to new location 1-2 km away from the original proposed site toward the west, where there are no major wadis. The distance of the site to the sea coast and the proposed Marine Protected Area would increase to 4-5km (see Annex 4). The coastal and marine environment and the Marine Protected Area will not be affected by the project located in the new proposed site. Only minor impacts are expected on the terrestrial habitat associated with site preparation, earth works and waste generation, which are localized and reversible. 38 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project Mitigation measures important to protect the coastal ecosystem from negative impacts include: • Liquid waste from machinery to be stored in tanks and removed from the site. • Domestic solid waste should be stored in waste skips prior to disposal to landfill. • Used oil should be collected, stored in sealed containers, and reused or disposed. • Regular maintenance of project equipment/machinery to reduce their noise emissions. 39 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project 1. PROJECT DESCRIPTION 1.1 Background The Ecological Baseline Survey for the Brum Axel Load Station is financed under the Road Asset Management Project (RAMP), and managed by the RMF Implementation Unit (IU). This should decrease damages to roads, improve roads conditions and increase its lifetime. Brum axel load station is a small project located in a remote vacant area on Mukalla- Aden coastal road in Hadramout Governorate (see Figure 1.1). The project works include: site preparation, construction of embankment, installation of weighbridge, parking site, asphalt layer (with base and sub-base), and construction of the station building. Figure 1.1: General map of the new site of Brum axel load station project 1.2 Project Objectives The objective of the ecological baseline survey is to provide adequate and accurate ecological baseline information for the ESMP. The specific objectives of this survey are: 1. Verify information obtained from the reviewing of existing documents, especially regarding the designated protected area situated in the coastal zone 5 km south east of the site. 2. Provide first hand, specific and updated information on the existing ecological characters of the proposed development site and its vicinity. In particular coastal habitats, terrestrial mammals, resident and migratory birds, amphibians, mangroves and higher plants. 3. Identify potential impacts of the project (during both construction and operation) on sensitive species and habitats, and propose mitigation measures. 40 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project 2. STUDY METHODOLOGY The Ecological Baseline Survey aims to identify and evaluate the potential impacts of the project on ecosystem and/or their components. Based on the Terms of Reference (ToR), the methodology used by the consultant consists of the following: 2.1 Literature review: This includes review of available reports, maps, existing documents and data addressing Bir Ali- Brum Marine Protected Area to obtain information regarding the species, size, types of protection and the sensitive habitats. 2.2 Field work: The first field survey was conducted by the RMF consultant on the 6th and 7th of June 2014. The survey was carried out at 5 sites (see Figure 1.2). All types of flora and fauna were found in all the sites were reported. The environmental conditions and the natural habitats were also documented to provide the baseline data. The possible impacts of the proposed project activities were assessed. The second field survey was carried on the 11th of November 2014 in order to appraise the environmental aspects of the new proposed project site. Figure 1.2: Location of the surveyed 5 sites of Brum axel load station project. 41 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project 2.3 Post Field Work and Reporting During the post field work the species were identified in the department of marine biology, Hodiedah University. Some terrestrial species, which were not identified in the field, were sent (samples with photos) to the Faculty of Agriculture of the Ibb University for identification. During the second survey for the proposed new project site, all terrestrial and marine ecological aspects and information were checked and confirmed through the consultation of concerned institutions (i.e. Faculty of Environment & Marine Sciences-Hadramout University and Environment Protection Authority-branch of Mukalla). Finally, the data and information collected were organized and compiled in this report. 42 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project 3. LEGAL AND INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK 3.1 World Bank Safeguard Policies The World Bank's environmental and social safeguard policies (ten of them) are a cornerstone of its support to sustainable poverty reduction. The objective of these policies is to prevent and mitigate undue harm to people and their environment in the development process. These policies provide guidelines for bank and borrower staffs in the identification, preparation, and implementation of programs and projects. The Bank’s 10 safeguard policies are presented in Table 1. Table 1.1: World Bank Safeguards Policies Triggered World Bank Policy/Directive Applicability Environmental Assessment (OP 4.01, BP 4.01) Yes Natural Habitats (OP 4.04, BP 4.04) Yes Forestry (OP4.36) No Pest Management (OP 4.09) No Cultural Property (OP 4.11) No Indigenous Peoples (OP 4.10) No Involuntary Resettlement (OP4.12, BP 4.12) No Safety of Dams (OP 4.37, BP 4.37) No Projects in International Waters (OP 7.50, BP 7.50, GP 7.50) No Projects in Disputed Areas (OP 7.60, BP 7.60, OP 7.60) No The scale of this project is very small and the environmental impacts are expected to be minor. Hence, the project is categorized as B. The project triggers only the Bank Safeguards Policy on Environmental Assessment OP 4.01 and Natural Habitats OP 4.04. 3.2 Applicable Yemeni Environmental Regulations 3.2.1 National Laws Since 1990 the Yemeni Government has established a number of national laws and regulations that concern and relate to the coastal and marine environment under responsibility of several agencies. A National Environmental Action Plan (NEAP) was adopted in 1995. The NEAP established priority issues and actions in the main environmental fields such as “Water Resources, Land Resources, Natural Habitats, and Waste Management”. Other legislation related to the marine environment is presented below. Environmental Protection Law No. 26 of 1995: Aims at fulfilling the international commitments with respect to protecting the environment and combating pollution. It 43 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project places the responsibility of protecting the environment and its natural resources, combating pollution, and protecting terrestrial and marine wildlife on formal government authorities, public and private institutions, and the individuals. In accordance with Article (35) of the Law, it is not permissible for any competent body to give permission or issue a license to establish or operate or amend projects or establishments that affect and damage the environment or contribute its deterioration or causing its pollution or participate in occurring such effects or harming human health or other living marine organisms, only in accordance to the standards or criteria or specifications or conditions are determined and specified by the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA). In accordance with the Article (36) of the Law, it is not permissible to issue licenses for projects and establishments which are considered as sources of environmental pollution or that is potentially causing environmental impacts and damage out of its activities, unless an environmental impact assessment referred to this law is undertaken. Yemeni Law No. 11 of 1993 concerning the Protection of Marine Environment from Pollution. The Law is mainly concerned with pollution by oil and pollution from passing ships. The law determines procedures for prosecuting, penalizing and requesting compensation from ships that violate the law. In its article No. 35, the law prohibits any form of discharge of pollutants of any kind and from any source into the sea without prior treatment. The Law prohibits shops, industrial and tourist complexes, facilities and public places to discharge, disposed of any polluting material, wastes or untreated liquids, which may cause pollution of the beaches of the Republic of Yemen, either done intentionally or unintentionally, directly or indirectly. The Law considers discharge as a punishable crime; as each discharge for any single day is considered as a separate single crime. The Law does not grant permission to build on seacoast or near it, which may result in discharge that contravenes the provisions of the Law, unless sewage and wastes treatment units are provided. 3.2.2 International Agreements Yemen ratified most international conventions, agreements and treaties, which have implications on the environment, including living marine resources. Treaties or conventions that were signed by the ex-YAR and the ex-PDRY are still in force according to the unification decree. The treaties/agreements that are applicable to the proposed project are listed below: • International agreement on the prevention of maritime oil pollution – London, 1954, amended in April 1962 and in October 1969; • International agreement on civil liability concerning damage resulting from oil pollution – Brussels, 1969; 44 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project • The regional agreement on the conservation of the environment of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden – Jeddah, 1982; • Protocol regarding regional cooperation to combat oil pollution and pollution from other harmful substances in emergency conditions – Jeddah, 1982; • Agreement on climate change – Brazil, 1992, Earth Summit; • Agreement on biodiversity – Brazil, 1992, Earth Summit; • Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species - 1993 (CITES). • Convention on the Control of the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal (1995) • International agreement on persistent organic pollutants (POPs) – Stockholm, 2001; and • Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (2001) • International agreement on migratory birds – 2002. • Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade (2002). • Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (2004). 45 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project 4. ENVIRONMENTAL BASELINE CONDITIONS This section gives the environmental baseline information of the project area based on available literature and field survey. 4.1 Balhaf-Brum Marine Protected Area (BBMPA) Over the past few years, conservation efforts of the country biological resources have focused primarily on the establishment of protected areas. These efforts have led to the identification of 15 areas throughout the country including Balhaf - Brum area. The area extending from Belhaf to Brum, qualified as an area of regional importance, was identified and proposed to become a Marine Protected Area (MPA) of Yemen (Wilson and Klaus, 2000). This coastal area, which is located in the eastern Gulf of Aden, is characterized by extensive fringing coral reefs and rich fishing sites and it is considered as an important site for nesting of seabirds and marine turtles. The Balhaf - Brum coastal and marine environment is both diverse and attractive from its rocky and sandy coasts to the saline mud flats, mangrove swamps, coral reefs and sea grass beds. This potential MPA is now part of the proposed Zoning Plan for the Coastal Zone Management (CZM), Bir Ali – Brum area, which comprises several zone categories of protected status along more than 50 km of coastline and a group of high aspect islands with extensive fringing coral reefs, rich fishing areas, seabird and, to the East of Bir Ali, marine turtle nesting sites and a salt water crater with fringing mangroves. Although the project of Brum axel load station is not located within this sensitive area, the coastal zone is about 5 km south east of the project site is considered to be apart from the proposed Marine Protected Area. According to the Zoning Plan for the Coastal Zone Management (CZM) Bir Ali – Brum area, this area is defined as a General Use Zone (GUZ). The least restrictive in terms of economic activity (see Figure 4.1). The natural habitat biodiversity of this area are described in more detail below 4.1.1 Coral Reef Coral reefs are some of the most diverse and valuable ecosystems on Earth. They support more species per unit area than any other marine environment. Corals are dominant benthic organisms in the proposed Marine Protected Area (Balhaf- Brum). They also form the most diverse and high cover of scleractinian corals encountered in the whole area (PERSGA, 2003). Along the mainland coast ‘dense’ or ‘sparse’ coral communities are almost ubiquitous as a more or less narrow fringe broken only by the principal sandy bays. The majority of the dense coral communities are dominated by massive or sub-massive corals (principally Porites, Goniastrea, Galaxea) or large monospecific areas of Pocillopora, with a variable scattering of diverse other corals on biogenic or non-biogenic rock, or scattered over areas of rubble and gravel, between and around them. The majority of Pocillopora and Galaxea colonies fringing the mainland shore are dead as a result of the 1998 bleaching, but at the majority of 46 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project mainland sites Porites and Goniastrea have survived to varying extents, ranging from no visible mortality to, in a few cases, almost no visible survival (PERSGA, 2002). 4.1.2 Birds Birds were reported near the MPA, and were commonly seen throughout the area, often in large numbers. Gulls (Larus sp.) and boobies (Sula sp.) were observed nesting on the area. Also it has been recorded that some area of the MPA as a summer breeding area for Larus hemprichii, and Phalacrocorax nigrogularis. Evans (1994) and Kemp (1998) recorded huge number of P. nigrogularis feeding in Bir Ali bay. 4.1.3 Turtles The proposed MPA, both mainland and islands, constitutes a nationally and regionally significant turtle nesting area. Turtle nests were found at almost all sandy beach sites throughout the area (PERSGA, 2002). Based on the consulted institutions (i.e. Faculty of Environment & Marine Sciences of the Hadramout University, and the Environment Protection Authority – the Mukalla branch), there is only species of turtle present - the Green Turtle (Chelonia Mydas). 4.1.4 Mangroves There are no known mangrove areas along the mainland coast of the Gulf of Aden anywhere east of Aden, but a globally unique sand mangroves (Avicennia marina) fringes the interior of the eastern most of the two large volcanic craters to the east of Bir Ali village. 4.1.5 Sea grasses Sea grasses were reported as extremely sparse. Halophila ovalis was found at one site in the MPA during the survey of PERSGA 2002. On the other hand, presence of scattered but extensive patches of sparse H. ovalis on sand inside Bir Ali bay was reported by Kemp (1998). Although these sea grass patches were most widespread in the eastern part of the bay they were recorded throughout the bay at depths ranging from 2 m to 8 m. 4.1.6 Cetaceans According to the survey of PERSGA, the area is home to large numbers of cetaceans, including at least two species of dolphins (the common dolphin Delphinus capensis, and the bottlenose dolphin Tursiops truncator). Bottlenose dolphins in particular are abundant and the area appears to be home to at least one, and perhaps two, large groups of these animals. Bottlenose dolphins were observed at various locations along the whole coast of the area. 47 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project Figure 4.1: Zoning Plan for the CZM, Bir Ali – Brum Area, Sector 2 4.2 Project Location and site description Brum axel load station project is located in a remote vacant area on Mukalla-Aden coastal road in Hadramout Governorate, west of Brum. There is a wadi running westwards to the coast immediately south of the project site. The project site is located about 50m from the wadi, with its mouth within or at the edge of the proposed protected area. The Project Site is not located within the sensitive areas but their proposed activities may affect the marine habitats of the Marine Protected Area (MPA) (see Figure 4.1). The new proposed project site is also located in a remote vacant area on Mukalla-Aden coastal road in Hadramout Governorate, with a distance of about 5 km from Brum town and about 32.5 km from Mukalla city towards the west. This new proposed site location is shown in the project location map (Figures 1.1 and 4.2). 48 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project Figure 4.2: Detailed location of the new site of Brum Axel Load Station 4.3 Topography and Geology The original project site is almost flat and surrounding by some volcanic hills (see Photo 4.1). Soil within the project area consist of coarse sand to gravel. There is a wadi around the project site running westwards to the coast. Photo (4.1): Topography of original Brum station site 49 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project The topography of the new proposed project site is flat and wider than the original one. It is also surrounding by some volcanic hills (see Photo 4.2). Soils within the project area consist of coarse sand to gravel. Photo (4.2): The topography of new site of Brum axel load station project 4.4 Climate The climate of the project area is relatively variable throughout the year. Hot and humid weather with mostly mild and little precipitation in the area is prevalent during the summer. The highlands are markedly cooler than the coastal plain. Temperature reaches 36° C in the coastal areas, due to seasonal winds saturated with moisture. The temperature in winter tends to be moderate in the area, about 20-24 °C. Rainfall distribution is typically bimodal with about 80% of rainfall recorded between July and September (Al-Alimi et al., 2013). The average annual rainfall is 50 mm. A few times throughout the year Hadramaut experiences heavy rainfall that may result in significant flooding. 4.5 Air Quality The air quality in proposed project area is very good. The primary air contaminant in the Brum axel load station project site is particulate matter, which is naturally occurring from the loose surface soil and gets suspended in the air due to the overland and sea breeze. 4.6 Hydrology Due to the low precipitation and the harsh climatic conditions in the project area and its surrounding areas, there are no above ground fresh water resources in the area. There are no rain gauge stations installed in the area that would provide seasonal rainfall 50 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project information. There is a wadi near the original project site; but there is no presence of surface water in the wadi. 4.7 Noise Present noise levels near the project site (original and new) are well within the acceptable limits and do not exceed 75 decibels. 4.8 Biological Diversity The surveys were mainly undertaken at the project site as well as the coastal area where a future impact by the Brum axel load station project is to be expected. The locations that were surveyed are (see Figure 1.2): the project site, the wadi, the mouth of the wadi, the sea coast, and the intertidal zone, which is located in significant distance from the original project location (see Annex 3). All these locations were surveyed to get an overall picture of the surrounding areas. 4.8.1 Terrestrial Habitat Flora The site selected for the implementation of the axel load station project (both the original and the new proposed site) has little natural flora and the majority of the plants at the site are low shrubs. Among the various vegetation types found in the project site are some trees of Al Sumar (Acacia tortilis), Al Sisaban tree (Prosopis juliflora) and Al Harmal (Rhazya stricta). In addition, the species of Aerva javanica, Lavandula angustifolia, Senna acutifolia and Cleome droserifolia were also observed in low numbers at the project site (Photo 4.3 to 4.6). Photo 4.3: Species of Acacia tortilis Photo 4.4: Species of Prosopis juliflora 51 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project Photo 4.5: Species of Aerva Javanica Photo 4.6: Species of Rhazya stricta The vegetation in the wadi stretching along the original project site is dominated by Al Sisaban tree (Prosopis juliflora) followed by Acacia tortilis and some of date Palm trees. Inside the wadi and 1 km away from the shore, a dense vegetation zone is dominated by Prosopis juliflora, Lemon trees and Palm trees were observed (Photo 4.7). Most the area of the wadi is covered by a mono specific community of Prosopis juliflora. Photo 4.7: A dense vegetation at the wadi1 km away from the shore At the mouth of the wadi, near the coast, a dense vegetation zone is dominated by Prosopis juliflora was observed (Photo 4.8). 52 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project Photo 4.8: Dense vegetation of Prosopis juliflora at the mouth of the Wadi Fauna The presence of any rare or endangered/ threatened species of fauna on the project site, at the wadi and/or the coastal area is rare. Wild animals include scorpions, millipedes, mountain hare and snakes. 4.8.2 Coastal and Marine Habitat The coastal and intertidal survey carried out in the area provides a brief description of the dominant habitats and species of the area. These are summarized below by type (sandy beaches and rocky shores). Sandy beaches The diversity at the intertidal zone at sandy beach is very low. However, there are different type of marine benthic organisms including the ghost crab Ocypode saratan and the hermit crab Coenobita scaevola, which are common in the area. Polychaetes and amphopods are also common on the sandy beaches of this area. Rocky shores The rocky shore communities of the area are home to a relatively diverse and frequently very abundant array of species. Filter feeders (barnacles, oysters, and mussels) dominate much of the intertidal, numerically followed by grazers such as crabs. Predators such as crabs are also abundant. Barnacles are abundant on rocky shores throughout the area. Large barnacles including Balanus reach more than 50% cover on some rocky areas (Photo 4.9). Small patches of macroalgae (Dictyota sp) are also reported during this survey on rocky shores. 53 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project Photo 4.9: Distribution of Balanus on rocky shore in the area Turtles Based on the consulted institutions (the Faculty of Environment & Marine Sciences of the Hadramout University, and the Environment Protection Authority - the Mukalla branch), one species of turtle - the Green Turtle (Chelonia Mydas) was recorded in the area. The sandy beach of the study area is reported to be used for nesting by the green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas). According to the fishermen and the local communities of the area, some sea these turtles may occur in the beach during nighttime. Mangroves The coastal area and the intertidal zone is free of any type of mangrove trees because the conditions within this area, specially the substrate, is not suitable for mangroves growth. Sea grasses Similarly, the sea grass was not observed in the intertidal zone of the area during both surveys. It was also not reported in the previous studies. Birds The dense vegetation of the Prosopis juliflora in the coastal area appears to be a resting, feeding, and breeding area for resident and migratory shore birds. The little white egret (Egretta garzetta) - one of the sea birds, was observed during the ecological survey near the coast (see Photo 4.10) 54 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project Photo 4.10: The little white egret (Egretta garzetta) at the mouth of the wadi Coral Reef Coral reefs form some of the world's most productive ecosystems, providing complex and varied marine habitats that support a wide range of other organisms. The area extending from Balhaf to Brum, qualified as an area of regional importance for coral reefs. This coastal area is characterized by extensive fringing coral reefs and rich fishing sites. According to Benzoni, et al., (2012) the distribution of coral in the Proposed MPA including Brum area found in more than 1 m depth, so it was difficult during this study to make a coral reef survey in the proposed area. In general, many species of coral are found in this area (Richard, et al., 2011). Benzoni, et al., (2012) reported around 15 species in Brum area only and the most dominant species were; Anomastraea irregularis, Siderastrea savignyana, Astreopora myriophthalma, Micromussa amakusensis, Symphyllia radians, and Blastomussa merleti. Although, the survey were made in the coastal and intertidal zones, some small butterfly fishes were observed in the crevices of the rocky shore which means that coral reef are healthy in the area. Abundance of butterfly fishes considers as good indicator for the reef health. 55 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project 5. ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS DURING CONSTRUCTION AND OPERATION PHASES This section presents the identification and assessment of potential environmental impacts on the coastal ecosystem and the proposed Marine Protected Area during the construction and operation phases of the project and potential mitigation measures. The Brum axel load station project activities (the original project site) will not be undertaken near the coastal area. However, the project creates marine pollution risk if pollutants from the station flow down the wadi during heavy rains to reach the sea. The summary of impacts and mitigation measures is presented in Table 5.1. 5.1 Solid and Liquid Wastes: original location Construction Solid waste, construction debris and unused buildings materials scattered all over the compound may be washed by surface water into the drainage system to the wadi and ultimately transport onto the sea. These wastes, especially the fine debris may cause seawater turbidity and sedimentation. These disturbances may lead to the degradation of coral communities. Moreover, disappearance of coral will also represent a net loss in the sea production since the coral structure provides refuge and nursery for several fish species. Operation In case of accident, leaks the oil from vehicles/equipment and/or oil spill, the pollutants may transport onto the sea with floodwater during heavy rains, and cause potential damage to the marine habitats. Table 5.1: Summary of Environmental Impacts and Mitigation Measures of Brum axel load station on the proposed Marine Protected Area: original site. Potential Environmental Mitigation Measures Impacts Construction • Shift the site of the project to another location, 1-2 Solid waste may be washed by km away from the proposed site toward the west. surface waters through the wadi • Waste management plan addressing proper and then transported onto the sea. collection Remove all the waste from the site. Operation • Liquid wastes from machinery to be stored in Liquid wastes include oil, which tanks in order to be removed easily from the site. resulted from routine works or in • Recycling of wastes such as wooden and paper case of accident may be packing. transported onto the sea during • Domestic solid waste are typically stored in waste heavy rains. skips and disposed of to a local dumpsite. 56 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project 5.2 Solid and Liquid Wastes: new proposed location The potential environmental impacts on the coastal and marine ecosystem during the construction and operation phases of the new project site are summarized below: • The new proposed location of Brum axel load station project is about 5 km far from the Proposed Marine Protected Area and the sea coast, whereas the distance from the site to the nearest point in the sea coast more than 2.5 km. Also there are chains of hills separating the proposed new site from the coastal area. There are no major wadis in the immediate vicinity of the site running to the coastal area. Hence, the endangered, rare and protected species such as green sea turtles and coral reefs, which were identified in the marine environment, should be affected during the construction and/or the operation of this project. • Construction and operation of Brum axel load stations may have negligible impacts on terrestrial ecosystem. These impacts are associated with site disturbance, earth works, storage of diesel/oils, leaks the oil from vehicles/equipment and/or oil spill, waste management and worker behavior. Moreover, these impacts are minor and reversible. On the other hand, most species identified within the terrestrial study e.g. Prosopis juliflora are not endemic to the area and are no endangered, rare or protected. To conclude, there are no negative impacts likely to be generated by the project activities in the new proposed project site on the species or their habitats in the coastal ecosystem or Marine Protected Area. 57 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project 6. MITIGATION MEASURES This section provides measures thought to avoid, reduce and minimize the present negative impacts of the Project on the coastal ecosystem and the proposed Marine Protected Area. The following mitigation measures have been recommended for the original site location: • In order to avoid the pollution of ‘Proposed Marine Protected Area’, and/or coastal ecosystem which may associated with the construction and/or operation phases of the Brum axel load station project, it is recommended to shift the site of the project to another location, 1-2 km away from the proposed site toward the west, where there are no any major wadis nearby and the sea coast is far from the site. • For this purpose, there is a piece of land 2 km west of the proposed site that could be used for this project. This land has the same environmental baseline conditions of the proposed site including; climate, air quality even has the same vegetation cover and type of fauna. In addition, this land has some advantages compare to the proposed site including its location about 5 km far away from the MPA and about 2.5 km from the sea coast. which is further away from the Proposed Marine Protected Area and the sea coast. Also there are no major wadis near this land running to the sea coast (see Annex 4). • The contractor should prepare and implement waste management program with provision of sanitary facilities, garbage containers, and liquid wastes from machinery should be stored in tanks and removed from the site. • The contractor ensures that all the waste and unused building materials are removed safely from the site and leave site clean after completion. • Recycling of materials such as wooden and paper packing materials. • Domestic solid waste, especially from the construction camp, are typically stored in waste skips and disposed of to a local dumpsite. 58 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project REFERENCES Al-Alimi, A. A. Nasher, G.S.A., Saban, M. S. and Ba Sad, R. H., 2013. Water Quality Degradation of Al-Mukalla Groundwater Aquifer/Yemen. International Journal of Water Resources and Arid Environments 2(1): 01-08 Benzoni, F., Pichon, M., Dutrieux, E., Chaîneau, C., Abdulaziz, M., and Al-Thary, I. 2012 The scleractinian fauna of Yemen: diversity and species distribution patterns. Proceedings of the 12th International Coral Reef Symposium, Cairns, Australia Evans, M. I. 1994. Important Bird Areas in the Middle East. Bird Life International, Cambridge, UK. Fraser-Brunner, A. (1950) Holacanthusxanthotis, sp. n. and other chaetodont fishes from the Gulf of Aden. Proc. Zool. Soc. London 120: 43-48 Kemp, J.M. 1998. Marine and Coastal Habitats of the Bir Ali area of Shabwa Province, Republic of Yemen: Recommendations for Protection. Report to the Environmental Protection Committee of theof the Council of Ministers, September 1998. 34pp Kemp, J.M. & Benzoni, F. 2000.A preliminary study of coral communities in the Northern Gulf of Aden. Fauna of Arabia 18:67-86 Kemp, J.M.; Klaus, R. 2002. Survey Methods for PERSGA MPA Surveys: Bir Ali – Belhaf. 64pp PERSGA 2002. Survey Design for Proposed Marine Protected Areas: Isles des Sept Freres, Djibouti; Aibat & Saaded Din, NW Somalia; Mukkawar (Magarsam) Island and Dungonab Bay, Sudan; Bir Ali – Belhaf, Yemen. PERSGA SAP, Jeddah. 101pp. PERSGA. 2003. “Coral Reefs in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Surveys 1990 to 2000: Summary and Recommendation.” The Regional Organization for the Conservation of the Environment of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden Richard C, Benzoni F; Dutrieux E; Chaîneau, C.H. 2011 Marine sensitivity mapping of the southern coast of Yemen from Balhaf to Mukallah. Creocean, Montpellier, p 256 Republic of Yemen. 1995. “Environmental Protection Law No. (26) of 1995.” English Translation of original Arabic text Wilson, S.C. and Klaus, R. 2000. “The Gulf of Aden. Seas at the Millenium: An Environmental Evaluation”, C. Sheppard Ed., 47-61. World Bank Safeguard Policies, http://www.worldbank.org/ 59 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project ANNEX 1 LIST OF INSTITUTIONS AND PERSONS CONSULTED DURING THE FIRST ECOLOGICAL FIELD SURVEY Institutions: Department of Marine Biology, Hodiedah University, Environmental Protection Agency Faculty of Agriculture, Ibb University Individuals: Dr. Abdullah Al Thibani, Ibb University Dr. Monther Thabit Numan, Aden University 60 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project ANNEX 2 PHOTOGRAPHS FOR THE ORIGINAL PROPOSED SITE OF THE PROJECT The coastal area Sea birds near sea coast The sandy beach of the area The rocky shore of the area 61 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project ANNEX 3 DETAILED FINDINGS FROM THE PROJECT SITE AND COASTAL AREA Site Location Distance from Type of Soils Flora Fauna No the Project Site (Km) 1 Project site 0.00 Sandy and Rhazya stricta, gravel Acacia tortilis, Aerva javanica, Lavandula angustifolia, Senna acutifolia Cleome droserifolia Ziziphus spina- christi Pulcaria somelensis 2 In the wadi 1.50 Sandy and Prosopis juliflora gravel Acacia tortilis Aerva javanica, Phoenix dactylifera Citrus sp Ziziphus spina- christi 3 In the mouth 2.50 Sandy Prosopis juliflora Egretta garzetta of the wadi Acacia tortilis 4 In the sea 2.70 Sandy Prosopis juliflora Egretta garzetta coast/ ghost crab intertidal (Ocypode saratan) zone hermit crab (Coenobita scaevola), Polychaetes, amphopods 5 In the sea 2.90 Rocky Dictyota sp Barnacles coast/ (Balanus), intertidal oysters, zone mussels, crabs 62 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project ANNEX 4 PHOTOGRAPHS FOR THE NEW PROPOSED SITE OF THE PROJECT A chain of hills separate the new site from the coastal area 63 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project ANNEX 5 Progress Report Field Survey to check consistency and correctness of the ESMP’s data of Brum Axle Load Weighing Station site, Almukalla Directorate, Hadramout Governorate. By: Dr. Mohammed Hezam Al-Meshreki (ESIA-National Consultant) Mr. Nabil Al-Kawri (RMF-Social Specialist) 14th October 2014 Introduction Based on the request of the RMF PIU management, the National Environmental & Social Consultant together with the RMF-Social specialist were carried out the field survey for Brum Axle Load Weighing Station site during the period October 11 to 15, 2014. The main objective of this activity is to check consistency and correctness of the ESMPs data as well as to confirm and verify information contained in the reports. The present progress report outlined the activities of the mentioned field survey based on the executive work plan that made by the National Environmental Consultant. The main achievements and implementation results of this task can be stated as follows: 1. Preparatory phase: The immediate outputs of the preparatory phase include: • Designing an operational plan and itinerary to manage and conduct the field survey properly. • Holding a meeting with the RMF PIU management and the social specialist to discuss basic concepts, last comments and questions in the ESMP document and the work plan of the field survey. • Rapid checklists and reviewing of available existing materials. • Gathering baseline data and preparing base materials (e.g. topo. sheets, forms, base maps etc.). • Preparing all the necessary required equipments to be used in the field survey such as digital camera, GPS, field measuring tools etc. 2. Actual Field work phase: • Meeting was held with the branch of RMF management in Almukalla to facilitate our task and state the survey’s itinerary. • Conducting actual field survey for both sites (the old and new ones) and carry out the necessary observations and measurements in the new site. • Conducting high-level discussions with the Director General and executive officers of Almukalla Directorate, Hadramout Governorate. The objective of the meeting was to facilitate public understanding of the nature of current task and explain the benefits and cope of Brum axle load weighing station to be able to collect and compile information properly. 64 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project • Visiting both of Hadramout University and the branch of Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) in Mukalla for obtaining available documents and information regarding Brum’s terrestrial and marine sensitive areas. • Collecting all relevant data and information through observation and some field measurements. 3. Office work after field work phase (On-going activities): • Analyzing and organizing all obtained information from the concerned institution and from the field survey and evaluating the results. • Producing of the necessary thematic maps and photos. • Completing and finalizing the existing ESMP as the basis and make the necessary adjustments taking into account the WB comments. • Preparing and submission of the new revised-ESMP report to the RMF PIU management. 4. Conclusions - The field survey was finished successfully and the work is going on as planned. All relevant information would be input, stored, processed and analyzed systematically. It is expected that the new revised-ESMP report will be finalized and submitted to the RMF PIU management during one week. - The proposed Axle Load Weighing Station should be built at the new selected location due its topographic suitability - Finally the National Environmental & Social Consultant will keep in touch with the RMF PIU management until both Ecological Survey and ESMP documents are finalized and cleared by the WB. 5. List of Institutions and Persons Consulted During Field Survey: Name Institution 1 Awadh Barefa’ Director of RMF, Almukalla branch 2 Dr. Salem Rabie Dean of Env. & Marin Science Collage, Hadramout University 3 Ali Al-Sady Director of Environmental Protection Authority, Almukalla branch 4 Salem Ba Nukhar Director General of Al-Mukalla Directorate 65 Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) Road Assets Management Project (RAMP) Ecological Baseline Survey for Brum Axel Station Project Meeting with staff of Environment & Marin Science Collage, Hadramout University Meeting with Director General of Al-Mukalla Directorate 66