Deletion of water bodies in Estonia – an action that was finally repealed
In April 2011 a precedent occurred in the domain of the Ministry of Environment of the Republic of Estonia in the form of deleting a large amount of the officially registered water bodies (lakes, streams, rivers and even entire bay areas). As a result of a dispute, the Ministry of Environment requested in a letter to revise the objects in the national environment register and make corrections so that it would comply with the lists of the books for lakes and rivers, published in 1964 respectively 1986. However, in reality there are many objects in these books that either no longer exist or have changed in some way. Other objects are not included as these have been created or emerged later than these books were published. Consequently the letter resulted in the “deletion” of more than 4600 water bodies from the publicly accessible part of the national environment register.
