The general plan of a settlement is the main urban planning document at the local level designed to stipulate long-term strategy planning and development of the settlement. Moreover, the general plan is a document that contains a lot of information about the environment: areas with complicated engineering conditions (high seismicity, flooding), sanitary protective zones of enterprises, landfill sites, coastal protection strips of rivers and other water bodies, territory of nature reserves and other information that constitutes environmental information.
In order to prevent breaches of environmental legislation all planning documentation should be developed on the basis of and in accordance with the general plan. Therefore, access to general plans of settlements, as part of ensuring the right of access to environmental information is the subject of a separate study of EPL.
