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TO PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT
The development of the 9th Transport Corridor will most likely result in the flow of major passenger and cargo traffic, including gas and petroleum products, to central and northern Europe via St. Petersburg and Leningrad Region. How will the construction and maintenance of the new transportation facilities affect the environment of the corridor? Is it possible to guarantee the corridor's ecological cleanliness? Will the corridor not lead to carrying contamination across the borders of the countries involved, damage their ecologies and further pollute the Baltic Sea? These questions must be answered before the work on the draft of the project is actually completed. That is why some of the projected facilities have already been subjected to governmental ecological examination. However, given the current economic situation in Russia, the great length of the corridor’s thoroughfares and the considerable volume of cargo traffic, this is not sufficient. An unorthodox approach should be used if the safety of the environment and the application of high technologies are to be guaranteed. First of all, we must keep in mind the Convention on the Evaluating the State of the Environment in the Frontier Regions that was signed in Espo, Finland, on February 25, 1991. According to the list enclosed in the Convention’s portfolio, some of the corridor’s facilities, including ports in the Gulf of Finland – both existing and to be expanded as well as those yet to be created – must undergo international inspection. This is a procedure that will help to assess the state of their environment in keeping with accepted international standards. The estimation of the effect of each individual facility of the corridor on the ecology of the Gulf of Finland will, however, bear no fruit if the inspection is not thorough and strict enough. There should be a long-term, say from 2010 to 2025, forecast of possible changes to the Gulf’s ecology. Such a long-term forecast would take into account the overall effect on the Gulf of Finland of all of the 9th Corridor’s facilities there. One should not ignore the considerable increase of the traffic load in the Gulf in relation to its comparatively small size or the part it plays in the ecology of the Baltic Sea. Only thus shall we be able to avert the ecological disaster we are now heading for and find adequate solutions to each individual environmental problem. Take oil spills, for example. They represent a potential major threat to the environment along and around the 9th Corridor. The experience of the US, Great Britain, France, Japan and other countries proves that a single country, no matter how highly developed, cannot on its own liquidate the consequences of such a catastrophe, the damage of which is often estimated in hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. The 9th Transport Corridor, therefore, while using other countries’ experience in removing oil spills and overflows should rely on state-of-the-art technologies and international cooperation. In the event of unforeseen catastrophes, various bioabsorbents must be spread on the disaster site by air, water and land transport, employing 21st century methods of gathering and clearing oil from the surface. All this will help to liquidate the consequences of such accidents in the most distant, and hard-to-reach parts of the Corridor in any weather, no matter how bad the situation is. It will also cut the time needed to clear the spill and minimize the costs, not to mention minimising damage to the environment. Certain steps have already been taken in that direction. Strategic storage centres for absorbents have been established in St. Petersburg and four other cities of Leningrad Region. The oil spills that occurred in the Gulf of Finland in the vicinity of the town of Vysotsk in1996 and on Lakes Ladoga and Valday in 1997 were liquidated with the help of new technology. The application of this modern technology is one of the first stages in the establishment of a comprehensive system for oil spill clearing in St.Petersburg and Leningrad Region. By guaranteeing the environmental safety of the 9th Corridor we will ensure the flow of investments into its infrastructure. The sooner we realise this, the better.
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