How many times have you walked past an illegal dump and thought, “Someone should do something”? How many times have you smelled the morning smog and known it was not normal, but had no idea who to tell?
Now you have an answer.
alert.ba is a new digital platform that gives people in Bosnia and Herzegovina a practical tool for reporting environmental problems: illegal dumps, fires, floods, rockfalls, landslides and air pollution. It takes less than a minute, with no app to install, from your phone or computer.
How does it work?
Three steps and you are done:
- Take a photo of the problem
- Mark the location
- Send the report
GPS picks up the location automatically, the system recognises the municipality and neighbourhood, and it immediately shows whether there is a school, road, watercourse or forest nearby, because that tells you directly how serious the problem is and for whom.
Every report is checked by the administrators before it appears on the map. False and duplicate reports are filtered out, and approved ones go on a public interactive map everyone can see: what was reported, where and when.
When a problem is fixed, a photo of the site after the clean-up stays with the report. A permanent record, in black and white.
Smog: a category of its own
For air pollution you do not even need a photo. It is enough to report smog in your neighbourhood. Reports from the same area are grouped on the map, so it becomes clear where the problem is worst: Sarajevo, Tuzla, Zenica, Banja Luka, all the places where the air becomes a burden in winter.
Data does not lie. And when there is enough of it, it is harder to ignore.
Report and act
Next time you come across something that should not be there, do not just post it in your story. Go to alert.ba and file a report. It takes less than a minute, and the record lasts longer than a story.
Because Bosnia and Herzegovina is too beautiful to ignore, and too much ours to wait for someone else to act.
Know of a problem that should be reported? Share this article with someone who can see it. Sometimes one person reacting is enough.
