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Fifteen per cent of all Russian territory has unacceptable pollution

Posted on: Friday, 25 July 2003, 06:00 CDT

Text of report in English by Russian news agency ITAR-TASS

Ivanovo, 25 July: More than 15 per cent of Russian territory has an environment that does not meet any admissible norms, the head of the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources, Vitaliy Artyukhov, said in the course of a meeting of the council of the leaders of the Central Federal District.

He said more than 60 per cent of the Russian population live in polluted areas and the main part of GDP is produced in those areas.

The fire risks of the past two years showed that the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Ministry of Emergency Situations should step up efforts to gain better control over the elements, the minister said.

He recalled that the situation remained most alarming in the country's Siberian and Far Eastern regions.

Earlier on Friday [25 July], the head of the forest protection department of the Ministry of Natural Resources, Aleksey Yermolenko, declared that since the beginning of this year, more forests have been damaged by fire than in the entire year 2002.

"Since the beginning of the fire-prone season, 20,000 seats of fire have been registered in the Russian forests. They affected an area of 1.7m hectares," Yermolenko noted. According to the Ministry of Natural Resources, 37,000 fires that burnt in the Russian forests last year ravaged 1.3m hectares.

According to the Rosgidromet hydrometeorology committee, no weather conditions of this kind have been registered in Siberia in the past 108 years. "Heat waves and winds coupled with absence of precipitation resulted in a fivefold increase in the number of fires in Siberia over the past year," Yermolenko said.

This year, smog produced by forest fires enveloped many towns and other residential locations in Khabarovsk Territory. In the taiga residential locations, the pollution of the air by combustion products is such that even healthy people feel a shortage of oxygen in the air, and people suffering from chronic diseases of the respiratory tract take it particularly hard.

As regards the pollution of the water bodies, the Central Federal District occupies the first place among all the federal districts, Artyukhov said. In his view, uncontrolled discharges of all kinds of wastes into the water bodies were the main cause of the existing situation.

He stressed that over 4,000 criminal cases were opened last year as result of inspection of the use of natural resources.

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