Ecological Situation in Russia

The analysis of ecological situation in Russia show that the crisis tendencies which appeared in the latest 15 years don’t get over and in several aspects becomes deeper inspire of the taken measures.

Russia with its saved huge tracts of forest (almost 65% of the total area of the country) has a very important meaning for ecodynamics. Together with some adjacent areas this massif forms The North Eurasian center of environmental stabilization which is the largest in the world and which importance for biosphere’s reconstruction will increase.

However 15% of the territory of Russia on which the main part of the population and industry is concentrated has unsatisfactory ecological condition and ecological safety is not guaranteed here. At that the specific indexes of the negative effects on the environment on the expectation of one person and units of gross domestic product in Russia are one of the highest in the world.

The excess of the allowed concentrations of the detrimental impurities is in the atmospheric air of 185 cities and industrial centres with the population of more than 61 million people (40% of the whole population of the country). The main sources of air pollution are still enterprises of ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy, chemistry and petrochemical industry, construction industry, power engineering, pulp and paper industry and motor transport.

The most unfavorable situation is in Arkhangelsk, Lipetsk, Moscow, Norilsk, Bratsk, Ekaterinburg, Kamensk-Uralskii, Kemerovo, Krasnoyarsk, Nizhny Tagil, Ufa, Sterlitomak, Chelyabinsk, Magnitogorsk,
Novokuznetsk, Omsk, Cherepovets.

Subjective tests show that the percentage of the influence of the air pollution to the general children’s morbidity is 17%, grown up’s morbidity – 10% on average. Air pollution causes 41% of breathing organs illness, 16% of endocrine system illness, 2,5% of oncological illness.

Not only local sources of detrimental impurities influence greatly on forest on lake’s ecosystems and agroculture but remote sources including foreign ones also have strong influence on it. More than 1 mln. tones of oxygenated sulfur of transorganical origin fall to the European part of Russia every year which is more than from the Russian sources of pollution. Essential contribution into Russian’s environmental pollution by oxyge-nated sulfur and nitrogen make Ukraine, Poland and Germany.

The quality of water in the most Russian water objects doesn’t meet health and fishing requirements because almost 40% of jettisonable into them sewages are concidered to be polluted. Almost half of the population of the country has to use water that doesn’t correspond health requirements because of bad water treatment and unsatisfactory condition of utility. The quality of drinkable water hasn’t become better.

The execution of water-purifying measures is carried out in the inadequate way because of the unstable work of the majority of the enterprises, their hard financial condition, insufficiency of budgetary funds.

The ecological condition of the agrocultural lands remains also unsatisfactory, the tendency of the lands degradation still exists. 43% of arable land decreases in its containing of humus and in the Nechernozemnaya zona the area of such soils is about 45 %. The lands with radiation pollution do not shorten.

Great damage to the condition of the vegetation world is made by uncontrolled storing of berries, mushrooms, valuable species of medicinal plants. The damage made by forest’s vermines and sicknesses, fires and illegal cutting of the forests is also great. Every year more than 300 thousands of afforestation dies of these reasons.

However we can point to some positive tendencies in the changing of the quantity of hunting animals. The process of stabilization and the upgrowth of the mammals which are considered to be hunting objects such as elk, wild boar and roe can be explained by the effectiveness of the fight against poaching, improvement of the condition of forage reserve of the hunting animals. Though the prognosis of the quantity of the sturgeon is not favorable and strict measures should be applied to the poaching.

Still the problems of the industrial and common wastes recycling, chemical nuclear and biological weapon destruction are very actual. There is a threat of the import of dangerous wastes to Russia. The serious danger comes from physically and moral outdated depositories of liquid radiation wastes and worked-out nuclear fuel, revealed atomic submarines. The high scale of deterioration of technological equipment on the chemical, petrochemical and microbiological enterprises leads to man-caused damages with further chemical infection of the territory.

The ecological condition of the country is characterized in details in annual state reports on the environmental condition in Russian Federation which are issued and are available to the consumers.

To be read after Unit 12