The general manager of Litoclean Peru highlights the regulatory evolution of these plans, which has allowed their successful development in the context of environmental emergencies.
The environmental rehabilitation plan is a tool used in Peru in the context of an environmental emergency with the objective of carrying out studies and actions to recover the altered elements and functions of the ecosystem after the negative impacts received. These plans are requested by the OEFA (Organismo de Evaluación y Fiscalización Ambiental) and require a multidisciplinary approach and a high technical capacity for their development. Sergio Biedula, general manager of Litoclean Peru, talks to us about the regulations on which they are based, the cases in which they are required and the complexity of their development.
– What differentiates a rehabilitation plan from a plan aimed at remediation?
The rehabilitation plan is made to attend environmental emergencies or the remediation of sites impacted by oil activity, and its development has the objective of recovering the altered functions of the ecosystem through remediation. The remediation plan, on the other hand, is outlined in the ECA Suelos regulations and involves the identification and characterization of the site, a risk assessment and, finally, all this makes up the remediation plan, which identifies the actions and techniques to decontaminate the site in question.
However, this management tool is approved by the Ministry of Energy and Mines, and it is the OEFA that evaluates and supervises compliance with the actions resulting from the plan.
In the case of other instruments, such as the remediation plan, these are also delivered to the Ministry of Energy and Mines, which promotes them to the OEFA to follow up on compliance.
– Until now it was more common to talk about remediation plans than rehabilitation plans, why are the latter gaining more prominence now?
Regulatorily, remediation plans can be requested since 2014, in the context of an environmental emergency. This had an evolution for sites in jungle under law 30321, which is specific for sites impacted by hydrocarbon activities in the basins of the Pastaza, Corrientes, Tigre and Marañón rivers. And subsequently, it also had a regulatory evolution, for impacted sites with the RM-310 of 2020, and in the RM-332, which is the one that is currently governing for events associated with marine contexts. Therefore, the application and implementation of rehabilitation plans comes from the past, but normatively it has had positive evolutions in which the results that are being obtained are very satisfactory with respect to the specific contexts that are being addressed right now.
– These regulations have been developed based on past events, i.e. a case such as the oil spill on the Peruvian coast in January 2022 has a direct impact on the legislation.
We have a multidisciplinary team of specialists, including professionals in biology, environmental engineering, civil engineering, mechanics, industry, geology, hydrobiology, etc., which enables us to develop rehabilitation plans, whether in maritime contexts or in the east, where the Amazon is located.
In the particular case of the maritime context, we have delivered the first rehabilitation plans based on the RM-332 regulations that we mentioned earlier. This has been possible thanks to the technical and human capacity we have, since it has meant conducting field campaigns with boats, divers and specialists from different disciplines to carry out sampling and, in parallel, having many brigades on the coast, reaching more than 3,000 samples in both aspects, in addition to achieving compliance with the schedule for the development in the times established in the same regulation.
