Chinese gold, Romanian water: 28 NGOs urge Bucharest not to abandon the Danube

On Monday, 17 August, twenty-eight Romanian non-governmental organisations sent a letter to Diana-Anda Buzoianu, Romania's Minister of Environment, Waters and Forests, asking Romania to open transboundary public consultations on the “Čukaru Peki” and “Malka Golaja” mining and metallurgical complex planned in eastern Serbia by the Chinese company Zijin Mining. The largest planned mining expansion in Serbia is thus being formally internationalised for the first time.

The Romanian organisations point to the transboundary impact the new complex would have on Romania. The project sits in the Timok basin, which drains into the Danube where the borders of Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania meet, only a few kilometres from the Romanian commune of Gruia, almost exactly on the boundary between Mehedinți and Dolj counties. Downstream follow Olt, Teleorman, Giurgiu, Călărași, Ialomița, Constanța and Tulcea, including the Danube Delta.

The organisations invoke the Espoo Convention on Environmental Impact Assessment in a Transboundary Context and, in particular, its 2003 Protocol on Strategic Environmental Assessment (the Kyiv Protocol), which extends the obligation of transboundary consultation from individual projects to plans and programmes. Article 10 of the Kyiv Protocol requires the party of origin to notify a potentially affected party “as early as possible” and to make the plan and the strategic environmental assessment report available to its public, in its own language. Both Serbia and Romania are parties to the Convention and the Protocol.

On 18 June 2026 the Government of Serbia adopted the decision to prepare the Spatial Plan for the special-purpose area of the future complex. The plan is financed by Serbia Zijin Mining d.o.o., part of the Chinese Zijin Mining group, Europe's second-largest copper producer, which intends to expand production to 850,000 tonnes per year, most of it for export to China. The plan covers an industrial area of 126 square kilometres across the territories of Bor and Zaječar and provides for the expansion of the underground Čukaru Peki mine, a new combined open-pit and underground copper and gold mine at Malka Golaja covering more than 1,000 hectares, a flotation tailings facility of about 1,900 hectares in the Kriveljska river valley, and a new metallurgical complex outside the urban core of Bor, with a smelter of up to 400,000 tonnes per year and an associated sulfuric acid plant. Relocation, or expropriation, of part of the local population is also foreseen.

The plan also anticipates withdrawing more than 800 litres per second from the Crni Timok, roughly half of the river's summer flow, while the Kriveljska river is designated as the site of the tailings facility. Both watercourses flow, via the Timok, into the Danube. The plan's own concept document (Elaborat) states that Bor, via the Borska river, the Timok and the Kriveljska river, “could potentially cause transboundary water pollution in the downstream Danube countries (Romania and Bulgaria)”.

The Romanian organisations single out the impact on the Vlach national minority, historically concentrated in the Bor and Zaječar districts. In the village of Krivelj, which sits directly on the Kriveljska river, Vlachs make up around 60 percent of the population. Back in August 2025, UN Special Rapporteurs voiced concern that the burden of Zijin's expansion falls disproportionately on this minority and warned of the risk of further displacement. The Vlach community is an officially recognised national minority, protected under the Constitution of Serbia and under international law.

More than 280 protected plant and animal species and 16 habitat types of international importance have been recorded within the plan area. Field studies at Malka Golaja during 2025 recorded 91 species protected under the Bern Convention, 21 under the EU Habitats Directive and 29 under the Birds Directive. The plan also cuts into a 7,000-year-old cultural corridor, with ancient Roman villae rusticae and roads in the cadastral areas of Nikoličevo and Slatina, while the UNESCO site of Gamzigrad-Romuliana lies about six kilometres from the planned Malka Golaja mine.

Resistance to the project in Serbia is already there. During the early public review, which ran until 3 August, around 2,000 Zaječar residents signed a petition against the project in roughly three hours, and some 300 written objections were filed. The Romanian letter also follows a criminal complaint against Zijin over illegal forest clearing at Malka Golaja, after which the national forestry inspectorate ordered the works stopped immediately. The company has broken the rules before: in 2020 the Bor city administration filed a criminal complaint against the smelter's management over sulfur dioxide concentrations reaching 2,285 micrograms per cubic metre, against a legal limit of 350, and in 2024 Zijin Copper was fined two million dinars for illegal construction of a mining facility in Bor.

The organisations ask their ministry to request, through diplomatic channels, that Serbia formally notify Romania under Article 10 of the Kyiv Protocol and grant Romania the status of a potentially affected party. That would mean Romanian authorities, municipalities and citizens, as well as the Vlach community in Serbia, receiving the draft plan and the strategic environmental assessment report in Romanian, at the same time as the Serbian public. The organisations also ask for independent expert assessments of transboundary and cumulative impacts, covering the latest expansion of the “Južni revir” open pit at Majdanpek and the diversion of the Mali Pek river, and for Romania to raise the matter bilaterally with Serbia's environment ministry and with the European Commission, since transboundary environmental cooperation is part of the EU acquis under Chapter 27.