For the first time in Israel, a Clean Air Zone will be enacted, banning polluting diesel-powered vehicles from a specific area. The zone will be in Haifa, as part of a five-year plan announced Tuesday by the Environmental Protection Ministry to reduce air pollution and environmental hazards in the Haifa Bay area.

According to Environmental Protection Minister Avi Gabbay, discussions are under way with the Haifa municipality on which areas will be declared Clean Air Zones, with a stress on densely populated areas along routes with heavy traffic by diesel trucks. The closure cannot be absolute, as diesel-powered trucks will not be barred from making deliveries to businesses located in these zones.

The plan includes incentives to reduce traffic from diesel vehicles in the Clean Air Zone, such as reducing the one-way toll for trucks traveling the length of the Carmel Tunnels from 86 shekels ($22.50) to 56 shekels. There will also be subsidies available for installing particle filters and for the purchase of trucks and buses that run on liquefied petroleum gas.

Public transportation in the area will be bolstered with 30 new buses that run on LPG, garbage trucks that run on natural gas and a pilot project that will make 50 small electric cars available for hourly rental at strategic points in the city.

The overall plan for Haifa encompasses a range of issues, and includes a large chapter on reducing air pollution from industry and other stationary emission sources. All industries will have to reduce their organic pollutants by installing new technology to reduce emissions; the industrial steam boilers in the bayside industrial zone will have to be refitted to use natural gas and other clean fuels; supervision, including surprise inspections, will be increased, as will continuous monitoring and air sampling.

The plan also calls for a system that will enable the Health Ministry to analyze morbidity and mortality data in the Haifa area so it can identify the effect of various concentrations of substances in the air. There will also be environmental impact studies conducted to examine the affect of this pollution on the ground, streams and various ecosystems. Ministry officials say the goal is reduce the emissions of volatile organic pollutants by 50 percent.

Other chapters of the plan address moving factories and installations from the bay area and making environmental information accessible to the public. The timetable for implementing most of these decisions is up to a year, except for those plans that are dependent on other plans. Next month the project will be brought to the cabinet for approval.

The plan was drawn up in conjunction with the finance, health and transportation ministries, as well as with the Haifa municipality and the member towns of the Haifa District Municipal Association for Environmental Protection. Its cost is estimated at 330 million shekels. The plan will be available for public perusal and comment for the next two weeks on the Environmental Protection Ministry website.

Hanna Kuperman, the chairwoman of the Israeli Forum for Coastline Preservation, was not impressed, saying that the Environmental Protection Ministry was actually advancing plans to introduce volatile and polluting materials from the Leviathan offshore natural-gas reservoir. “There are several new plans in the works for Haifa Bay aimed at treating, storing, and refining these polluting fuels,” she said. “These plans will add hundreds of times more pollution that exists today.”

Ella Naveh, of the group Mothers and Fathers Saving Haifa and the Krayot, concurred, saying that the new plan was meant to distract the public, “By claiming that the air will improve, and that ‘it’ll be okay.’”