Russian Crisis has Helped the Environment
1/18/99
*******************************
RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: Russian Crisis has Helped the Environment
Source: Reuters
Status: Copyrighted, contact source to reprint
Date: 1/18/99
MOSCOW, Jan 18 (Reuters) - Environmental conditions in Russia have
improved in recent months because of the fall in industrial production
since the August financial crisis, the country's top ecology official said
on Monday.
"Under the present economic conditions, the fall in production has
inevitably led to less pollution," Viktor Danilov-Danilyan, head of the
state committee for the environment, told Reuters in an interview.
"Preliminary data for 1998 shows that the amount of air, water and other
pollution has fallen by several percent in each category," he said.
Russia inherited one of the world's bleakest environmental landscapes with
the Soviet collapse in 1991 following decades of heavy industrialisation
with little concern for ecology.
But a drop in industrial output in the past decade has meant cleaner air
and water. Danilov-Danilyan said industry now gives off 35 percent less
air pollution than in 1991, and 15 to 18 percent less water and other
pollutants.
Still, the country faces vast environmental problems that rarely receive
proper fuunding or the attention of top officials, he said.
"The president hasn't given any attention to this problem in recent
years," Danilov-Danilyan said. "If you judge by the state-of-the-nation
annual reports the number of references to environmental problems has
shrunk every year since 1993."
"By 1998 it reached zero. It was not mentioned at all," he said.
Despite the ailments of President Boris Yeltsin, who checked into a
hospital on Sunday with a bleeding ulcer, the Kremlin has still generated
initiatives in other public policy areas.
"Of course, I would like top government officials to devote at least as
much attention to environmental problems as in Europe, the United States,
Canada and Japan, because our environmental problems are much more acute,"
he said.
The environmental official listed a long series of woes affecting Russia's
air, water and soil, making about 55 to 60 percent of country
"ecologically unacceptable."
"The greatest health threat comes from the low quality of the drinking
water," Danilov-Danilyan said. "One third of all drinking water does not
correspond to health guidelines."
"It's a big source of illness to the population," he added.
Cleaning the water supply system would cost Russia about $200 billion,
funds far beyond the reach of a government unable to pay all of its
foreign debts or its state workers.
Air pollution makes major cities such as Moscow dangerous, mostly because
of automobiles which are in poor condition and use low-quality fuel,
Danilov-Danilyan said.
Another looming danger comes from the area around the Mayak nuclear waste
reprocessing centre in the Ural Mountains, where a lake poisoned by
radiation risks leaking into nearby rivers and water supply in coming
years if measures are not taken, he said.
Forest fires caused record damage in the Russian Far East in 1997 and
1998, he said, largely because of human factors and lack of preventive
measures.
One study found that half of all illnesses in the Siberian city of Perm in
the Urals were linked to the environment. Danilov-Danilyan said about four
or five percent of illness nationwide stems directly from environmental
hazards.