Rehabilitation and development of environmental pollution areas: pilot project in a former uranium mining area

Environmental hazards are obstacles to the development of communities and regions if they occur on broad areas with different sorts of damage at the same time, like ground damage caused by mining, ground contamination and damage to forests. In industrialized countries, people become increasingly aware of such grievances, mainly concentrating attention on certain types of areas like old industrial areas, mining and conversion areas. Often general problems of areas with weak structure (weak economical value creation, poor access possibilities) are added to the environmental hazards and this is the case in the former uranium mining area around Johanngeorgenstadt in the Saxonian Erzgebirge. The autonomous strengthening of negative processes causes the people to migrate and the settlement areas start to shrink. Facing such problems, approaches offering purely technical solutions for individual cases as practised in the past by the regional structural policies quickly reach their limits. Instead, more complex solutions are needed, connecting individual projects with the development of new perspectives for the communities involved. As a result of the positive experiences in uranium mining, the area of rehabilitation and development, the states with significant environmental hazards are given the recommendation to integrate areas needing rehabilitation and development into their plans for the state and regional development. This is based on the consideration that at first problematic areas must be determined in the development plans and then the actions plans containing the formulation and implementation of the goals of rehabilitation and development must be set up