Russia's polluted Arctic lands to undergo major clean-up MOSCOW. Aug 7 (Interfax) - The Franz Josef Land archipelago rehabilitation project developed at the behest of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has been launched. "There are two main goals of the expedition: the main one is to develop priority measures to locate and eliminate the most dangerous pollutions, and the second one is to develop a program for eliminating all pollutions and existing secondary pollutions on the Franz Josef Land," Marina Nekrasova of the Council for Production Force Research (SOPS) told a press conference in Moscow on Friday. The SOPS won a competition organized by the Russian Natural Resources Ministry for cleaning the polluted territories on the archipelago islands. The expedition consists of four squads; three of them are already on the islands and have started the geological survey of the territory and the primary ecological assessment of sources. The squads will be based on the Alexandra Land island, Nekrasova said. The experience of the past environmental expedition will help assess the territories' potential for self-recovery, as well as ways of distributing and places of accumulation of toxic wastes, which will allow to determine the scope of work to be carried out before 2020, she said. The main ecological problem of the Arctic region is "to minimize the negative impact on the environment as a result of the current business activities," said Svetlana Yurmanova, deputy head of the SOPS waste and damage regulation department. "The Arctic is one of the world's most ecologically vulnerable regions. There is a broad circle of environmental issues: preserving the diversity of the Arctic flora and fauna, environment monitoring and others," Yurmanova said. There was no single database for pollutant sources and polluted areas in the Arctic before, she added. The current effort aims to create registers containing cartographic material, with full information on the state of the environment in the Arctic zone, and to make a list of polluted areas in the Arctic, Yurmanova said. "The wastes that are not known of are like a time bomb," she said.
Russia's polluted Arctic lands to undergo major clean-up MOSCOW. Aug 7 (Interfax) - The Franz Josef Land archipelago rehabilitation project developed at the behest of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has been launched. "There are two main goals of the expedition: the main one is to develop priority measures to locate and eliminate the most dangerous pollutions, and the second one is to develop a program for eliminating all pollutions and existing secondary pollutions on the Franz Josef Land," Marina Nekrasova of the Council for Production Force Research (SOPS) told a press conference in Moscow on Friday. The SOPS won a competition organized by the Russian Natural Resources Ministry for cleaning the polluted territories on the archipelago islands. The expedition consists of four squads; three of them are already on the islands and have started the geological survey of the territory and the primary ecological assessment of sources. The squads will be based on the Alexandra Land island, Nekrasova said. The experience of the past environmental expedition will help assess the territories' potential for self-recovery, as well as ways of distributing and places of accumulation of toxic wastes, which will allow to determine the scope of work to be carried out before 2020, she said. The main ecological problem of the Arctic region is "to minimize the negative impact on the environment as a result of the current business activities," said Svetlana Yurmanova, deputy head of the SOPS waste and damage regulation department. "The Arctic is one of the world's most ecologically vulnerable regions. There is a broad circle of environmental issues: preserving the diversity of the Arctic flora and fauna, environment monitoring and others," Yurmanova said. There was no single database for pollutant sources and polluted areas in the Arctic before, she added. The current effort aims to create registers containing cartographic material, with full information on the state of the environment in the Arctic zone, and to make a list of polluted areas in the Arctic, Yurmanova said. "The wastes that are not known of are like a time bomb," she said.
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