Brno - Creating supermarkets and discount shopping centres leads to a marked deterioration of the environment in the areas they are built in.

The new supermarkets take over productive land, they are being built on floodplains and play a negative role in the spreading of cities out of control.

A poll, unique in the Czech Republic, was conducted by a civic association called Nesehnutí (Unbent) and was paid for from grants from Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein. It put to test business plans of 168 large resale companies in the country.

Two discount chains, Lidl and Penny, are planning to build the largest number of new shops, mostly in the towns with the population of twenty to fifty thousand.

We'll build on quality land

According to the research, up to ninety per cent of all the projects will result in deterioration of the quality of living due both to increase in road traffic and noise and to the destruction of green areas.

As the research shows, in the last year 49 shops opened outside the built-up areas allowing for the towns to expand further into the countryside.

"Almost half the business plans require annexation of farming land, sometimes of the highest quality. Shopping often gets priority treatment even in case of protected areas," the study says.

According to the paper, new shops are bound to take over 855 thousand square meters of farming land; 17 per cent belongs to the first class protected land of the highest quality.

This trend is being criticized by experts. "I think annexing quality farming land is a serious problem, if not a crime. Under the Communist regime, a hectare of quality land south of Brno had cost up to a million Czech korunas; now it's being sold for 100 thousand," claims Mr František Toman, head of the Institute for applied and landscape ecology at the Mendel University in Brno.

Almost 60 per cent of business plans for new shopping centres demand cutting trees, the study says. "Twenty new big shopping centres are situated in the floodplain areas," the authors of the environmental study add in their findings.

What will the shopping centre look like?

Most plans for the new shopping malls expect a marked increase of road traffic, mostly by more than ten per cent, but in some cases by as much as fifty per cent. "In 2007, twenty two thousand parking spaces were designed, mostly as classic concrete sites," the study says.

The civic association people also found out that those building new shopping centres do not spend much time thinking about their appearance. "77 per cent of the shopping centres planned in the last year are designed as simple constructions built to the company template and do not take into account the landscape they are being built on," they say.

"The study clearly shows that the expansion of shopping chains in the Czech Republic damages environment on the one hand, and requires new regulation and control mechanisms to be created on the other hand," Mr Jiří Koželouh from Nesehnutí civic association concluded.