From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 12/20/2006 12:13 PM
Russia Air Pollution
Publication time: Today at 20:43 Djokhar time

The extent of pollution and ecological collapse in Russia is due to decades of ill-considered military and industrial development undertaken in virtual secrecy and with scant concern for the environmental and health consequences. Environmental pollution clamps a stranglehold on the big cities in Russia.

Pollution in Russia now threatens the health of millions of citizens and the safety of crops, water and air. In 84 of Russia's largest cities the air pollution is ten times the accepted safety levels. In some areas, especially among children, levels of respiratory problems are 50 per cent higher than the national average. Moreover, Russia is a major contributor to global ozone depletion, being the World's largest producers and consumers of Ozone Depleting Substances (ODS). Thus, Russias emphasis on production at all costs has cost this country its environmental integrity.

In the former Soviet Union, the government promoted production at all costs for decades. The strategy for economic growth in the USSR was established in the first Five Year Plan of 1929, and remained fundamentally unchanged for the next 50 years. At the time of the 1917 revolution, and despite a drive for industrialization in the late 19th century, economic development in Russia had continued to lag well behind that of the major Europeans countries and the United Sates. By the late 1930s, following enormous losses incurred during World War I and the sub- sequent civil war, and part due to the perceptions of an increasing threat of further military conflict, the objective of catching up with the West became the dominant influence on economic policy. The relatively liberal New Economic Policy of 1921-28 had mixed results and was seen as inadequate to the task of achieving the desired юdash for growth.ю The new approach, centered of accelerated industrialization, required rapid mobilization of capital, labor and material inputs, with lesser emphasis being placed in their efficient use (so-called extensive development). The introduction of a full scale command economy-including nationalization of almost the entire capital stock and collectivization of agriculture-was seen as the only way to achieve these shifts in resources at the required pace.

As far as natural resources were concerned, there had been a tendency to exploit the more accessible reserves first. Cost of extraction and transportation therefore rose as production (of oil and gas in particular) was forced to shift from Europe and Central Asia to harsher and more remote regions in Siberia and the Far East. At the same time, the incentives for enterprise managers to innovate, increase efficiency or improve the quality of their output were inadequate or even perverse. The planning system motivated higher production primarily by imposing increasingly ambitious targets since it could not afford to allow temporarily lower output from one enterprise to jeopardize the input s to others. Thus the infrastructure and environment were further causalities of the preoccupation with growth and meeting the yearly plan objectives. Risks of environmental damage were not allowed to obstruct the resource requirements of rapid industrialization, and would eventually impose enormous costs on the Soviet economy.

The extent of pollution and ecological collapse in Russia is due to decades of ill-considered military and industrial development undertaken in virtual secrecy and with scant concern for the environmental and health consequences. In the Soviet Union, environmental officials were always kept subservient to the agencies that ran the military, utilities, mines, chemical industries and metal-works. Consequently, the purity and integrity of the environment were seriously compromised. Experts maintain that over a hundred big cities in Russia are now beleaguered by stiff environmental predicaments. As a result, pollution in Russia now threatens the health of millions of citizens and the safety of crops, water and air. All of these problems are the result of "economics without limits"--a "perversion of the system of values."

The weaknesses of Soviet environmental protection more apparent was in the Kuznetsk coal-mining basin, or Kuzbass, a 96,000-square-kilometer (37,000-sq.mi.) swath of southwest Siberia that for most of this century has been pillaged in the name of progress for its unparalleled mineral riches. The area holds effectively bottomless stores of coal, iron, manganese and gold. For example, under Kuzbass soil lie an estimated 725 billion tons of bituminous coal--145 times the total amount of coal ever mined in the entire world. Though coal and iron ore were discovered in the region in the 1700s, for most of its history the Kuzbass, 2,000 miles east of Moscow, has harbored only the harsh penal colonies of successive despotic regimes. Rapid development came to the area in the late 1920s, when Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin ordered a nationwide expansion of the industrial base. In southern Russia, in the basin of the Don River; in the Far North, Karelia and the Kola Peninsula; and most of all, through the Ural Mountains to Magnitogorsk and east to the Kuzbass, the state built a vast zone of mines and metallurgical combines. Sulfur, Carbon dioxide are some of the gases emitted from those industries. These contribute to air pollution and climate change. The only limits were time and manpower. After Stalin's death in 1953, Soviet leaders expanded the Kuzbass' growth, then went after the immense reserves of oil, gas and timber in the rest of Siberia.

Russian industry has never taken proper and reasonable ecological standards and requirements, lacking anything like resource-saving waste-free technologies and efficient purification facilities. There are 28,000 enterprises, among them 428 iron-and- steel works, 625 chemical and petrochemical operations, and 5,429 engineering plants churning out pollutants baneful to both the people and their environment.

Leninsk-Kuznetski, home to 160,000 people. From the center of town, an hour and a half to the south of Kemerovo, smokestacks tower in every direction, and the streets are covered with coal dust and ash. Like most of the factories, the largest of the city's nine mines are downtown. Residents take their drinking water in pails from the Inya, the local river. Because it contains more chemical waste than water, it flows even when winter temperatures drop far below freezing.

In Novokuznetsk, the air grows even worse. During the spring thaw, the city's mammoth metalworks mock environmental laws, releasing into the sky three or four times the maximum legal level of heavy metals. In winter and summer, the climate conspires to trap poisonous air above the city for weeks at a time. A report by the regional Health and Epidemiology Survey indicates that sulfur levels near an agglomeration plant run as high as 312 times the acceptable level. Near a 5.4 million-square-foot pharmaceutical plant, fluoride is 300 times the norm.

Two-thirds of the city's air pollution comes not from its monster factories but from the low stacks of its centralized, and massively inefficient, coal-burning utility plants. According to municipal authorities in Novokuznetsk, the city's air averages 10 times the legal level of benzopyrene, a carcinogen found in coal. One industrial district is burdened with 48 times the legal level. On bad days, the authorities say, nitrous oxide runs 15 times the norm, ammonium 10 times and soot 7 times. Studies around the world have implicated these pollutants in a variety of human ailments, some fatal, ranging from asthma and sore throats to cancer. By winter's end, according to a local chemist, snow on the city's streets contains 200 times the level of pollutants that the law allows.

While the decline in industrial production has reduced emissions of air pollutants from stationary sources, this has been more than made up by increased motor vehicles and industrial accidents. In 150 cities, including Moscow, Tomsk, Krasnodar, Rostov-on-Don and Yekaterinburg, vehicular emissions now exceed those from industry. Often concentrations of harmful substances from automobile exhausts exceed maximum allowable concentrations 10-20 times. Air pollution is responsible for 41 percent of respiratory diseases and 16 percent of endocrine diseases.

Even if to ignore accidents, the situation with air pollution by industries strikes. The following table displays the critical levels of harmful emissions in the air in some cities.

City Tons of harmful emissions

Novokuznetsk 560,000

Lipetsk over 386,000

Omsk 293,000

Angarsk 233,000

Ufa 232,000

Industrial wastes let out into the atmosphere most frequently contain:

Type of industrial wastes

Total solid particles per million tons

solid particles 3.6

gases and liquids 17.7

Type of gases and liquids per million ton

sulfur dioxide 6.4

nitrogen oxides 2

carbon 5

hydrocarbons 2.7

Source: Yelena Krivyakina, "Russian Cities Are About To Clean Their Act", RusData DiaLine- BizEkon News, May 16, 1996

The contribution of transport means and industries contribute for air pollution in 150 cities, and the levels of exhaust fumes over those cities often vastly exceeding admissible guidelines. In Moscow, Tomsk, Krasnodar, Rostov-on-Don, and Yekaterinburg their content range from 10 to 20 times of maximum permissible concentrations (MPC).

Over the past two years escalating numbers of vehicles on the roads have put a stifling strain on the environment. The vastly proliferating cars are the huge blight on the Russian cities nowadays. Moscow has, at the moment, nearly 2,000,000 of them, and every day it further hosts around 200,000 cars from elsewhere. Car exhausts have reached 1.7 million tons a year to account for 87 percent of entire air pollution levels. By contrast, the share of industrial pollution over the past few years has slumped by 40 percent and is now not more than 7 percent of total air pollution.

But the figures are grim: 1995 Environment Ministry statement indicated that two-thirds of Russia's citizens, particularly those who live in industrial cities, are breathing severely polluted air, and as many as 50 million out of the country's 147 million people inhale air 10 times dirtier than recommended by Russian standards.

Moscow's burgeoning number of automobiles spew forth nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide in record quantities, putting the health of residents at risk. In an in-depth US study published in 1995 in the Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, experts drew a clear parallel between effects of airborne particles from traffic and industry to the likelihood of premature death. The study linked breathing foul air to increased heart disease, respiratory diseases and lung cancer.

The dangers are signaled in Russia's population figures. The total population of Russia numbered 147.8 million in early July, down 200,000 since the beginning of 1996, according to the data just released by the State Statistics Committee. A total of 553,200 children were born in Russia between January and May 1996, down four percent on the same period of 1995. A recent report compiled by Yablokov's commission shows that in 1995 the population of Russia decreased by 330,000, even after half a million immigrants entered the country. The biggest increase in death rate was among those aged 20 to 49. The death rate among able-bodied men is four times higher than among women and the average Russian man dies two years before reaching pensionable age. In the Far North and similar areas the population has decreased by 5.5 percent over the past four years. There has been a steady deterioration from a population growth rate of 2.2 percent in 1990 to a 5.8 percent decrease in 1995.

The human health consequences of this inattention to the environment have been catastrophic. For reasons that Aleksei Yablokov, the head of the Security Council's environmental commission, attributes to the degraded environment, the life expectancy of men in Russia has dropped to 57.3 years, compared to 72 in the United States. In the Kuzbass, it is only 51. According to Andrei Luzhkov, director of immunology at the Kemerovo Medical Institute, 80 percent of workers in the Kuzbass have impaired immune systems. Other studies indicate that adults in Kemerovo are more than three times as likely as people elsewhere in the country to suffer endocrine ailments and 2.7 times as likely to have chronic bronchitis.

Kemerovo's children have three times the kidney and urinary- tract infections and, according to the Medical Institute's Kaznin, 2.6 times the fatal nervous-system disorders. In one of the city's particularly polluted neighborhoods, the number of retarded children is triple the national average. Russia's health problems, like its polluted environment, are hardly confined to the Kuzbass. In Novosibirsk, to the northeast of Kemerovo, several schools have reported cardiovascular problems in all of their students. In the Kola Peninsula, near Scandinavia, fully one- fourth of the babies have heart defects or bone-marrow disorders. Not far to the south, in the town of Nadvoitsy, decades of dumping by an aluminum plant has contaminated drinking-water sources, turning the teeth of the town's children black and rotten.

The environmental scourge at the root of such problems shows no signs of abating. On the contrary, according to a report released by the Environment Ministry in June, air pollution in the 60 to 70 largest Russian cities, where between 40 million and 50 million people live, rises several times a year to at least 10 times higher than the legal limit. As many as 60 million other people live in places where pollution yearly exceeds health standards by at least five times.

Though it may not be apparent, the city government has undertaken various measures to cut down on Moscow's growing air pollution problem. From closing down dozens of factories within the city to forbidding trucks from traveling in the city center during certain hours to drafting legislation on auto emissions testing - the Moscow authorities have tried in the past several years to stuff the genie of air pollution back into the bottle. Moreover, Moscow Mayor Yuriy Luzhkov is attempting to cut the levels of air pollution in the Russian capital, ordering a local oil refinery to stop burning off unwanted gas and demanding that all cars in the city be fitted with catalytic converters. In addition, Luzhkov understands the need for ecologically clean petrol as a result, he categorically demanded that all Moscow cars be fitted with catalytic converters. He also insisted that production of 103-grade, leaded petrol be ended whereas measures should be drawn up and used against those who produce and sell this petrol. Owners of private cars will also be forced to fit their vehicles with converters. These cost 500 dollars each. But, according to Luzhkov, if they fail to do so, the consequences will be very unpleasant. So, they will have to choose.

Over the past two years escalating numbers of vehicles on the roads (in Moscow, for one, they surged by nearly 700,000 or 1.5 times) have put a stifling strain on the environment. The vastly proliferating cars are the hugest blight on the Russian cities nowadays. Moscow has, at the moment, nearly 2,000,000 of them, and every day it further hosts around 200,000 cars from elsewhere. Car exhausts have reached 1.7 million tons a year to account for 87 percent of entire air pollution levels. By contrast, the share of industrial pollution over the past few years has slumped by 40 percent and is now not more than 7 percent of total air pollution.

In Moscow, schools have been closed, hospitals refitted to take more beds and key medical staff recalled from holidays, but the current influenza epidemic continues to claim more victims daily, paralyzing the country's already troubled health service. The number of new patients hospitalized with flu related respiratory problems is growing at eight or nine per cent a day say city health ministry officials. At the Central Clinical Hospital, one of Moscow's largest, they have double the normal number of respiratory cases in their care. Experts had identified the strain as so- called South African flu A H3 N2. This virus is more dangerous than other strains and if not cured in seven or eight days, the disease develops into a more protracted form and may cause lung complications. The problem is exacerbated by the level of air pollution in the city, which further reduces resistance to the disease and adds to the seriousness of the lung complications that often follow. Cancer incidence and related mortality in the cities of Omsk, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk and Kemerovo, where benzpyrene levels in the air exceed MPC by six to ten times, are greater than on the average in the country.

Air pollution and disease incidence in Russia in 1995, based on RF security council environmental commission findings shows that despite a drop by ten million tons in industrial emissions into the atmosphere by Russia in the wake of production slump, to 21.3 in 1995 from 31.8 million tons in 1991, the amount is still very big. And it was rendered bigger still by accidental ejection of noxious substances registered in Togliatti, Kurgan, Nizhny Tagil, Volzhsk, Novokuibyshevsk, Norilsk, Tambov, Sochi and Chita last year alone.

Badly polluted air proves responsible for 41 percent of respiratory and 16 percent of endocrine pathologies. It becomes particularly dangerous for 37 percent of children, adults being affected nearly four times less frequently. Of moment also is that urban population of industrial centers is hit twice as often compared to rural. The air in Kurgan and Shadrinsk, for example, is by far worse compared with that in the surrounding areas.

Children are most affected with bad air estimated to be the cause of 37 percent of children's diseases. In Omsk, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk and Kemerovo benzpyrine exceeds limits 6-9 times resulting in high levels of cancer. In Magnitogorsk, a cocktail of chemicals in the air is causing birth defects tumors, malignant blood diseases and diabetes.

Magnitogorsk, in the Urals, whose air stands out for a particularly 'rich' chemistry, leads for the rates of congenital defects and cancers, blood dyscrasias and diabetes melitus in children. Dwellers of Monchegorsk (sulphur anhydride in the air above 2 MPC, formaldehyde 1.4 MPC, and dust 1.2 MPC) suffer from tumors, muscular-skeletal pathologies, congenital deformities and skin cancer by, respectively, 1.8, 2, 1.6 and 1.5 times more often than in other parts of the country. As to Novosibirsk, with a whole variety of noxious substances exceeding MPC by from five- to eight- fold, natural abortions in its women are by 3 to 5 times more often the case than elsewhere in Russia, oncologic and endocrine incidence in its population also rating higher by, accordingly, 3.5 and 2.6 times.

The effects of air pollution is not only compromising the health of Russians but has also damage the environment. The city of Norilsk, labelled as the worst polluted city in the Arctic, illustrates this problem. Norilskюs nickel smelters have belched out so much sulfur into the atmosphere that trees and vegetation for many kilometers around have died.

Finally, in 1949 the Soviet Union passed the world's first resolution defining maximum permissible levels of toxic substances. But like the progressive Soviet Constitution, this resolution and the nation's other environmental laws were worth less than the paper on which they were written. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia has added still more laws to the books. But today's reality--even where the high-minded plans are not sabotaged by corruption--is that no one can afford to follow through. For instance, Andrakhanova admits that her 19 new programs and 200 inspectors have no local budget and that only half the federal money promised them actually comes through.

3. Related Cases

 (1) : Ozone Loss = [OZONE]

(2) : Bio-geography = AIR

(3) : Environmental Problem = Pollution Air [POLA]

4. Draft Author: Marcela Rabi Fall, 1996

B. LEGAL Cluster

1.Discourse and Status: AGReement and INPROGress

Russia recognizes its legal obligations as a development country signatory to the Montreal Protocol respecting target Ozone Depleting Substances phase-out schedules. However, the countryюs economic capability to complete this task has decline significantly, since ratifying the London Amendments in 1992. As a consequence, it has fallen behind in phase out activities and will not be able to meet its phase-out scheduling obligations. A number of steps have been initiated to ensure that its obligations are met. Responsibility for ODS phase-out activities has been assigned to the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Protection (MEPNR). A comprehensive Country Program as described below has been developed and formally adopted by the government. This program acknowledges that Russia will be out of compliance with its obligations as of January 1, 1996 and proposes a revised phase-out schedule. Russia has presented its Country Program to the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) Council and to the Parties to the Montreal Protocol, formally acknowledging its non-compliance status and confirming its commitment to the revised phase-out schedule in writing. Russia has also undertaken to address issues associated with exports of ODS through an agreement with the Parties to the Montreal protocol which outlines the actions to be taken. Similarly, Russia is expected to be a developed country contributor to the Multilateral Fund for the Implementation of the Montreal Protocol (Multilateral Fund), with in-kind contributions. While no contributions have been made to date, Russia has undertaken to resolve its current areas positions and fulfill its contribution obligations when its economic conditions improve.

At the national level, the Russian presidency has had a department dealing with environmental matters since 1991, initially just an ecology adviser, then a coordinating council on ecological policies and, until lately, the inter-departmental commission for ecological safety -- all involving Yablokov. However, the recent re-organization of the presidential power structure since the 1996 summer's presidential election "has made the situation absolutely unclear." A proposal to President Boris Yeltsin was sent to set up a special council for ecology and stable development to draw more attention to Russia's serious ecological problems. However, this council could comprise leaders of different federal structures connected with the problems of ecology and stable development as well as leading scientists and businessmen on a part-time basis. It would be a consultative body within the President's office "to encourage the analysis of the problems which will be of growing importance for Russia."

6. Forum and Scope: Russia and UNILATERAL

The Former Soviet Union (FSU) ratified the Montreal Protocol in November, 1988 as a developed country. The Russia Federation continues the FSU membership in the Protocol and in January, 1992, Russia ratified the London Amendments. However, ratification of the Copenhagen Amendments has not occurred. Based on its ratification status as a developed country under the Montreal Protocol, Russia's obligations for ODS phase-out are in accordance with the accelerated developed country schedule for halons (January 1994), and for CFC, CTC and MCF (January 1996).

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, reinforced in April 1995 by the Berlin mandate and now by the Geneva Declaration, was adopted at the UNCED Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, in June 1992. 159 countries have ratified it since then and it came into force on March 21, 1994. This 27-point Convention proposes "a global strategy" for restricting atmospheric emissions of gases causing the greenhouse effect, believed to be responsible for causing the climate change phenomenon that could spell disaster for planet Earth. However, it was only the industrialized countries that undertook to try and bring down, individually or collectively, their greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000. Only a few of these countries are now in a position to respect this undertaking, it was confirmed at the Geneva Conference.

Contrary to what was loudly demanded in Rio by non- governmental organizations, the Convention does not lay down any binding rules on signatory countries. It is simply a "framework" to act as an incentive and a context in which Governments can jointly establish new policies and programs. This is why the Geneva Declaration mentions for the first time "legally-binding quantifiable targets," without however going into any figures. This text will now serve as a basis for negotiations on drawing up the Protocol decided last year in Berlin and which should be adopted at the end of 1997 in Kyoto, at the third Conference of the Parties to the Climate Change Convention. Several countries, including most notably the small landlocked states, are calling for a Protocol to the Rio Convention fixing greenhouse gas emission reductions at 20% below 1990 levels by the year 2005. Germany suggested 10% below 1990, however.

7. Decision Breadth: Russia and 123

In 1992, 132 nations signed the Global Climate Convention in which they agreed to stabilize their carbon dioxide emissions at 1990 levels by the year 2000. However, as recently as April 1995, several of these countries (most notably Norway) admitted that they will be unable to reach this goal. In Europe, the only nations currently poised to meet the emissions target are those that have successfully made the transition from coal-fired to natural gas- fired generating capacity.

Continue:

Source: EDU

http://www.kavkazcenter.com/eng/content/2006/12/20/6920.shtml