Prof. Alon Tal an associate professor in the Swiss Associates Institute for Dryland Environmental Research at the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research presented a report entitled “Israel’s Environmental Movement: Trends, Needs and Potential” to Knesset Speaker MK Reuven Rivlin (Likud) on Tuesday afternoon. The report’s delivery was the main event of Environment Day at the Knesset.
The report, prepared for the UK-based JMG Foundation, offers the most comprehensive survey of the environmental movement in Israel ever undertaken and found that it is lacking a trained professional staff and perilously dependent upon foreign donations - often from a single source - to maintain itself. Much of the environmental movement is just 20 years old and significant changes have taken place in its second decade. Tal offers a detailed portrait of the current movement and recommendations for its future at the outset of its third decade. The readable report relied on a detailed questionnaire completed by 98 organizations as well as in-depth interviews with over 30 environmental leaders in Israel to draw a picture of a movement out of its infancy, but still struggling to establish itself professionally.
The environmental movement has exploded in the last decade with more than 50 new organizations founded. The umbrella organization, Life and Environment, now boasts more than 100 members. Those organizations have learned to work together and are remarkably homogenous in terms of priorities and messages. Formal and ad-hoc coalitions have sprung up at a surprising rate, the survey revealed. At the same time, roughly 50% of the organizations surveyed relied on international foundations for over 50% of their funding. That funding was often project-based which puts many environmental organizations on precarious economic footing. Without steady sources of income, long-term strategic planning and financial reserves to weather lean years were largely absent – a situation which represented an existential risk to many of the organizations.
Tal and his team stressed that such a heavy reliance on international funding sources as opposed to domestic funders and membership fees was not a good sustainable practice for these organizations – particularly at a time when many former foundation stalwarts have or will be closing down their Israel operations. Among the other findings of the report were the low utilization of volunteers and the lack of recruitment of new members. More importantly for securing a strong financial base, most NGOs do not have many members. Only three organizations boasted more than 5,000 members and 77% of organizations polled had 100 members or less. What’s more, only a quarter of the organizations collect any membership dues at all – which indicates that the general public is largely uninvolved in the environmental movement and has little ready access to it even if they were interested in participating, according to the survey.
Tal also found that the level of professional training amongst environmental groups was not particularly high – PhDs in relevant environmental sciences, public health experts, and lawyers were all absent from most organizations. In addition, economists also failed to appear on the employment rolls of most of the organizations at a time when environmental advocacy worldwide has increasingly become an economic argument. Tal and his research team called for the hiring of more professionals as a crucial step in continuing the fight against rapacious development. While the mainstream population of Israel was becoming more environmentally aware, large population segments such as the Arab and haredi (ultra-Orthodox) sectors still remained for the most part unengaged, the report’s authors found. As the two sectors are the fastest growing in Israel, Tal recommended actively increasing the environmental movement’s engagement with those populations.
Finally, the report recommended addressing the “elephant in the room” – the issue of overpopulation in Israel. Israel is the most crowded of the Western countries, yet continues to pursue a vigorous pro-natal and pro-immigration policy. Much of Israel’s environmental problems can be attributed to a population explosion from one million people in 1950 to 7.7 million people in 2011 – a scant 61 years. Tal argued that the environmental movement must start to address population policy in the same way that environmental movements abroad do so.
“Sadly, no organization or philanthropic organization is willing to seriously address these issues, which will ultimately make Israel ecologically barren and socially untenable," he writes, suggesting that the complex issues be addressed in a sensitive but proactive manner.
BGU Environmental Report.pdf
