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Russia
Environmental Problems
With the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Moscow and the Russian
Federation escaped direct responsibility for some of the world's
worst environmental devastation because many of the Soviet disaster
sites were now in other countries. Since then, however, the gravity
and complexity of threats to Russia's own environment have become
clear. During the first years of transition and reform, Russia's
response to those conditions was sporadic and often ineffectual.
Only in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a linkage identified
between the increasingly poor state of human health and the destruction
of ecosystems in Russia. When that linkage was established, a new
word was coined to sum up the environmental record of the Soviet
era--"ecocide."
Environmental Conditions
In the Soviet system, environmentally threatening incidents such
as the bursting of an oil pipeline received little or no public
notice, and remedial actions were slow or nonexistent. Government
officials felt that natural resources were abundant enough to afford
waste, that the land could easily absorb any level of pollution,
and that stringent control measures were an unjustifiable hindrance
to economic advancement. In the 1990s, after decades of such practices,
the government categorized about 40 percent of Russia's territory
(an area about three-quarters as large as the United States) as
under high or moderately high ecological stress. Excluding areas
of radiation contamination, fifty-six areas have been identified
as environmentally degraded regions, ranging from full-fledged ecological
disaster areas to moderately polluted areas.
Data as of July 1996
Russia
Major Crises
Dangerous environmental conditions came to the attention of the
public in the Soviet Union under the glasnost policy of
the regime of Mikhail S. Gorbachev (in office 1985-91), which liberated
the exchange of information in the late 1980s. The three situations
that gripped public attention were the April 1986 nuclear explosion
at the Chernobyl' Nuclear Power Station in Ukraine, the long-term
and ongoing desiccation of the Aral Sea between Uzbekistan and Kazakstan,
and the irradiation of northern Kazakstan by the Semipalatinsk (present-day
Semey) nuclear testing site. The overall cost of rectifying these
three disasters is staggering, dwarfing the cost of cleanups elsewhere,
such as the superfund campaign to eliminate toxic waste sites in
the United States. By the time the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991,
such conditions had become symbols of that system's disregard for
the quality of the environment.
Since 1990 Russian experts have added to the list the following
less spectacular but equally threatening environmental crises: the
Dnepropetrovsk-Donets and Kuznets coal-mining and metallurgical
centers, which have severely polluted air and water and vast areas
of decimated landscape; the Urals industrial region, a strip of
manufacturing cities that follows the southern Urals from Perm'
in the north to Magnitogorsk near the Kazak border (an area with
severe air and water pollution as well as radioactive contamination
near the city of Kyshtym); the Kola Peninsula in the far northwest,
where nonferrous mining and metallurgical operations, centered on
the region's nickel reserves, have created air pollution that drifts
westward across northern Scandinavia; the Republic of Kalmykia,
where faulty agricultural practices have produced soil erosion,
desertification, and chemical contamination; and the Moscow area,
which suffers from high levels of industrial and vehicular air pollution
and improper disposal of low-level radioactive waste. The experts
also named five areas of severe water pollution: the Black Sea,
the Caspian Sea, the Sea of Azov north of the Black Sea, the Volga
River, and Lake Baikal.
Each of Russia's natural zones has suffered degradation of specific
kinds. In the tundra, the greatest damage stems from extraction
and transportation of mineral resources by crude techniques. In
delicate tundra habitats, oil spills, leaks in natural gas pipelines,
and the flaring of natural gas destroy northern marshland ecosystems,
which take many years to purify naturally. Also endangered are reindeer
grazing lands, upon which indigenous peoples traditionally have
depended for their livelihood. In the permafrost zones that constitute
about 40 percent of Russia's territory, lower air, water, and ground
temperatures slow natural self-cleansing processes that mitigate
contamination in warmer regions, magnifying the impact of every
spill and leak.
In the taiga, or forest, zone, the overcutting of trees poses the
greatest threat, particularly in northern European Russia, the Urals,
and the Angara Basin in south-central Siberia. Uncontrolled mining
operations constitute the second major source of damage in the taiga.
In the broad-leafed forest zone, irrational land use has caused
soil erosion on a huge scale. Urbanization and air and water pollution
also are problems.
The forest-steppe and steppe regions are subjected to soil exhaustion,
loss of humus, soil compacting, and erosion, creating an extremely
serious ecological situation. The soil fertility of Russia's celebrated
black-earth (chernozem--see Glossary) region has deteriorated significantly
in the postwar period. Overgrazing is the main problem in the pasturage
regions of the Russian steppe and has severely affected the Republic
of Kalmykia in southwestern Russia and the region east of Lake Baikal.
In Russia's limited semiarid and arid territories, poorly designed
irrigation and drainage systems have caused salinization, pollution,
and contamination of surface and underground water, but not to the
degree that these problems exist in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and
Kazakstan.
Air Quality
Although reductions in industrial production caused air quality
indexes to improve somewhat in the 1990s, Russia's air still rates
among the most polluted in the world. According to one estimate,
only 15 percent of the urban population breathes air that is not
harmful. Experts fear that a return to full industrial production
will mean even more dangerous levels of air pollution given Russia's
current inefficient pollution control technology. Of the 43.8 million
tons of pollutants discharged into the open air in 1993, about 18,000
industrial enterprises generated an estimated 24.8 million tons.
Vehicle emissions added 19 million tons.
In the early 1990s, Russia's Hydrometeorological Service, which
monitors air quality, reported that 231 out of 292 cities exceeded
maximum permissible concentrations (MPCs) for particulate matter,
sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, or carbon monoxide. Pollution levels
in eighty-six cities exceeded MPCs by a factor of ten. The most
polluted cities are centers of heavy industry (ferrous and nonferrous
metallurgy, petroleum refining, chemicals, and pulp production).
Not surprisingly, the largest industrial cities head the list. In
European Russia, these are Moscow and St. Petersburg; the Ural manufacturing
centers of Yekaterinburg, Nizhniy Tagil, Magnitogorsk, and Ufa;
and Astrakhan', Samara, and Volgograd on the lower Volga. In Asian
Russia, the heaviest air pollution is in Omsk and Novokuznetsk in
southwestern Siberia, Irkutsk on Lake Baikal, the Noril'sk industrial
center in northwestern Siberia, and Khabarovsk in the Far East.
Levels of airborne sulfur, nitrogen, and lead remain high.
Most vehicles in Russia continue to burn leaded fuel. In the early
1990s, motor vehicles contributed about one-third of total hazardous
emissions in urban and industrial areas. Throughout the Soviet period
and into the 1990s, trucks were the greatest vehicular polluters
because privately owned vehicles were relatively scarce. As Russia
adopts the culture of the privately owned vehicle, however, it is
likely that transportation will increase its share of total emissions.
Data as of July 1996
Russia
Water Quality
Soviet leaders took little action to protect the nation's inland
bodies of water or surrounding oceans and seas from pollution, and
Soviet planners gave low priority to risk-free treatment and transport
of water. As a result, 75 percent of Russia's surface water is now
polluted, 50 percent of all water is not potable according to quality
standards established in 1992, and an estimated 30 percent of groundwater
available for use is highly polluted. The most serious water pollution
conditions relative to demand and availability of clean water are
in the industrial regions of Krasnodar and Stavropol' territories
north of the Caucasus, Rostov and Novosibirsk oblasts, the Republic
of Chechnya, and the city of Moscow. In Krasnodar and Stavropol',
inherent water shortages exacerbate the situation.
The quality of drinking water is a major concern. Poor water management
standards have raised health concerns in many cities, and water
safety also is doubtful in the countryside, where 59 percent of
the population draws water from common wells affected by groundwater
pollution. Unsanitary runoff from populated places and agricultural
sites contributes heavily to pollution of sources that ultimately
provide water for domestic use; the quality of drinking water declines
noticeably during spring floods, when such runoff is heaviest. Rudimentary
portable filters are not widely available. An estimated 8 percent
of wastewater is fully treated prior to dumping in waterways; most
water treatment facilities are obsolete, inefficient, and generally
overwhelmed by the volume of material that now passes through them,
but funding is not available to replace them.
In recent years, officials have identified many of Russia's rivers
as carriers of waterborne diseases, epidemics of which were especially
frequent in 1995. In July 1995, Moscow city health officials reported
an outbreak of cholera-causing bacteria in the Moscow River. Officials
have warned of increasing outbreaks of sewage-related diseases--including
cholera, salmonella, typhoid fever, dysentery, and viral hepatitis--in
many other Russian rivers. Citizens have been instructed to boil
all water before use. In some areas, clean water is so scarce that
water is imported from other regions. The highest consumption of
imported water is in the republics of Sakha (Yakutia) and Kalmykia,
Kamchatka and Magadan oblasts in the Far East, and Stavropol' Territory.
Among the chemicals and contaminants dumped frequently and indiscriminately
have been compounds containing heavy metals, phenols, pesticides,
and pathogenic bacteria. Chemical pollution was dramatized when
fires ignited spontaneously on the Iset' River in Sverdlovsk (present-day
Yekaterinburg) in 1965 and on the Volga River in 1970. Russian agriculture,
like industry subject to centralized control and quota fulfillment
in the Soviet era, continues to cause severe water pollution by
overuse and improper handling and storage of toxic chemical fertilizers,
herbicides, and pesticides. During the Soviet era, dioxin, a carcinogen,
was used routinely as an agricultural insecticide, and it heavily
tainted rural wells. In 1990 Soviet authorities declared that dioxin,
which enters the body through drinking water, was the most serious
health threat from pollution.
In 1992 the Russian Federation's Committee on Fishing reported
994 cases in which bodies of water were "completely contaminated"
by agricultural runoff. Runoff from fields results in fish kills
and groundwater contamination. Among the largest river systems in
European Russia, the Volga and Dnepr rivers suffer from acute eutrophication--depletion
of dissolved oxygen by overnutrition of aquatic plant life--which
distorts natural life cycles. Large-scale fish kills have occurred
in the Kama, Kuban', North Dvina, Oka, and Ural rivers.
Pollution in the Gulf of Finland, the easternmost extension of
the Baltic Sea, includes untreated sewage from St. Petersburg, where
heavy metals and other chemical substances are not properly removed
prior to dumping. In late 1995, St. Petersburg city officials signed
an agreement with a French water purification company to process
the city's drinking water; the Finns hope that such a move also
will improve the overall quality of the city's effluent water.
Water quality in Lake Ladoga, Europe's largest freshwater lake,
came to the attention of government authorities in the mid-1990s.
Factories on the lake, which is just east of St. Petersburg, have
discharged tons of heavy metals and other toxic substances into
local rivers. The shores of Lake Ladoga and Lake Onega to its east
have been storage sites for fertilizers, livestock waste, and chemicals
as well as for radioactive military waste. When local rivers emanating
from the lakes reach the Gulf of Finland, their chemical burden
changes the oxygen balance in the gulf. Similar situations affect
the Arctic Ocean, into which Siberian rivers flow after passing
through numerous industrial and power-generating centers, and the
Baltic Sea, into which large amounts of military waste and chemical
weapons were discarded from Poland and the Baltic republics during
the Soviet era.
Marine biologists report that only five species of fish remain
in the Black Sea, which once was a highly diverse marine ecosystem
with twenty-six species. Between 1985 and 1994, the total fish catch
in the Black Sea dropped from 675,000 to 45,000 kilograms. According
to environmentalists, the entire sea is in danger of "dying" because
only about 10 percent of its near-surface volume contains enough
oxygen to support life. Deoxygenation is caused primarily by large-scale
infusions of hydrogen sulfide, which comes mainly from the Danube,
Don, South Bug, and Dnepr rivers that flow into the sea from the
north and the west. Large amounts of mercury, cadmium, arsenic,
and oil have been identified as well. In 1992 the littoral states
of Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine signed
an agreement to take specific measures against pollution of the
Black Sea and the tributary rivers that flow through their territory.
Conflicting goals and positions among the states involved, however,
have hindered environmental cooperation.
The Caspian Sea is also beset with chemical pollution and the loss
of indigenous species, and it now faces the danger that 1 million
hectares of its coastline, including Russia's Volga River delta,
will be flooded. According to a 1996 report, 300,000 hectares in
Dagestan already had been inundated. By 1993 the average water level
of the sea had risen by more than two meters. Scientists blame the
rise on the 1977 Soviet damming of the Garabogaz Gulf on the Caspian
coast of Turkmenistan. Previously, the waters of the gulf intermixed
with those of the Caspian, acting as the main thermal regulator
and volume stabilizer of the larger body. In 1996 the Russian government
allocated US$38 million for Caspian Sea conservation, to be matched
by US$34 million from local budgets.
Water quality problems are most severe in European Russia, especially
in the Volga Basin, where about 60 million people live. Of all water
withdrawn from natural sources in Russia, 33 percent comes from
the Volga. About half of that water returns to the Volga as polluted
discharge, accounting for 37 percent of the total volume of such
material generated in Russia. The Volga's water does not meet the
norms for drinking water and is unsuitable for fish farming or irrigation.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, numerous government committees
were formed to clean up the Volga. Few of the resulting restorative
programs have been implemented, however, and the Volga remains under
ecological stress.
Lake Baikal, a water resource of world importance located in south-central
Siberia, long was the focal point of Soviet environmental efforts
to end the pollution that the pulp and paper plants caused in the
lake's watershed. A series of comprehensive Soviet and post-Soviet
plans yielded limited success in protecting the lake's water and
shoreline, which gradually have succumbed to chemical stresses.
In 1995 the World Bank and the European Union (EU-- ) granted funds
for cleaning up Lake Baikal, and in 1996 the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission
announced United States plans to aid Russia in overhauling paper
plants in the Baikal region .
Soil and Forests
Russia devotes about 10 percent of its land to agriculture, but
land quality is declining. Erosion carries away as much as 1.5 billion
tons of topsoil every year (see Agriculture, ch. 6). In the past
twenty-five years, Russia's arable land area has decreased by an
estimated 33 million hectares, with much of that loss attributable
to poor land management. Experts fear that agricultural land management
may deteriorate further under Russia's new land privatization as
individual farmers try to squeeze short-term profit from their new
property. In the early 1990s, an estimated 50 percent of arable
land needed remediation and improved management for agricultural
productivity to improve. Russia's southern regions, especially the
Republic of Kalmykia, are losing about 6,400 hectares of agricultural
land yearly to desertification. To the east, desiccation of the
Aral Sea and expansion of the Qizilqum Desert in Kazakstan have
a climatic drying effect that exacerbates desertification in Russia
to the north and west.
In Russia an estimated 74 million hectares of agricultural land
have been contaminated by industrial toxic agents, pesticides, and
agricultural chemicals. Considerable land also is lost in the extraction
of mineral resources. Unauthorized dumping of hazardous industrial,
chemical, and household waste takes land out of production. Flooding
is a problem near the Caspian Sea and in Stavropol' Territory, where
the construction of reservoirs has removed land from use.
In 1994 about 22 percent of the world's forests and 50 percent
of its coniferous forests were in Russia, covering an area larger
than the continental United States. Of the 764 million hectares
of forested area, 78 percent was in Siberia and the Far East. At
that time, vast stands of Siberian forest remained untouched. Such
broad expanses have an important role in the global carbon cycle
and in biodiversity. In the 1990s, the atmosphere of economic stress
and political decentralization has the potential to accelerate drastically
Russia's rate of deforestation and land degradation, especially
in remote areas. Environmentalists fear that timber sales will be
used as a short-term stimulus to regional economies; already, Chinese,
Mongolian, and North and South Korean companies have taken advantage
of looser restrictions and the critical need for hard currency to
begin clear-cutting Siberian forests. Timber harvesting by Russian
firms decreased dramatically in the 1990s, from 375 million cubic
meters in 1989 to 110 million cubic meters in 1996.
Aleksey Yablokov, head of the nongovernmental Center for Russian
Environmental Policy, has estimated that Siberia is losing 16 million
hectares of forest annually to cutting, pollution, and fires--an
amount six times the official government estimate and higher than
the rate of loss in the Amazon rain forests. Fires, which normally
improve biodiversity and long-term stability, cause excessive damage
because of poor fire control measures. Large tracts of Russian forest,
most notably 136,000 hectares in the vicinity of Chernobyl', have
suffered radioactive contamination, which also increases the likelihood
of forest fires. Because forests cannot be decontaminated, the distribution
of radioactive particles in the trees remains constant over many
years.
Inefficient lumbering procedures cause unnecessary loss of timber;
as much as 40 percent of Russia's harvested trees never go to the
mill, and unsystematic clear-cutting prevents productive regrowth.
Forest management has improved gradually in the post-Soviet era.
In 1993 the Supreme Soviet, then the lower house of Russia's parliament,
passed the Principles of the Forest, national laws that include
guidelines for management and protection. Because implementation
of these laws has been quite slow, many regional jurisdictions have
adopted their own management standards.
Acid rain from European and Siberian industrial centers and from
power generation plants has reduced the Siberian forests by an estimated
730,000 hectares. Hydroelectric dams on Siberian rivers raise significantly
the temperature of air and water, destabilizing the growing conditions
of adjacent forests. Because of the enormous oxygen production and
carbon dioxide absorption of the Russian forests (a capacity estimated
to be second only to that of the Amazon rain forest), removal of
large sections of those forests would have a drastic effect on the
quality of land in Russia and the quality of air over the entire
world.
Data as of July 1996
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