Environmental Issues

Soviet ideology held that nature was the servant of industrial and agricultural progress, and that humans should dominate nature on a grand scale. While this sentiment was common throughout much of the world at the time of the formation of the USSR, it does seem to have been taken further here than elsewhere. Joseph Stalin, leader of the USSR from 1922 to 1953 and a major architect of Soviet policy, is famous for having said, “We cannot expect charity from Nature. We must tear it from her.” During the Soviet years, huge dams, factories, and other industrial facilities were built without regard for their effect on the environment or on public health. Russia and the post-Soviet states now have some of the worst environmental problems in the world. By 2000, more than 35 million people in the region (15 percent of the population) were living in areas where the soil was poisoned and the air was dangerous to breathe (Figure 5.6A–C).

FIGURE 5.6 Photo Essay: Human Impacts on the Biosphere in Russia and the Post-Soviet States The region is home to some of the worst pollution on the planet. More than 70 years of industrial development with few environmental safeguards have wreaked havoc on ecosystems. Industries are attempting to become cleaner, but decades may pass before significant improvements are realized. 5.6a Courtesy Randy Olson/National Geographic/Getty Images, 5.6b Courtesy NASA image created by Jesse Allen, Earth Observatory, using data obtained from the University of Maryland’s Global Land Cover Facility. Image interpretation provided by Dr. Gareth Rees and Dr. Olga Tutubalina, Scott Polar Research Institute, 5.6c Courtesy WIN-Initiative/Getty Images, 5.6d Courtesy Alexander Zemlianichenko Jr./Bloomberg via Getty Images

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the region’s governments, beset with myriad problems, have been both reluctant to address environmental issues and incapable of doing so. As one Russian environmentalist put it, “When people become more involved with their stomachs, they forget about ecology.” Pollution controls are complicated by a lack of funds and by an official unwillingness to correct past environmental abuses. Figure 5.6 shows just a few examples of human impacts on the region’s environment, most of which are related to ongoing industrial pollution (as in Norilsk, in Figure 5.6A, B) or failure to properly dismantle contaminated industrial sites made obsolete when a more market-based economy was introduced (as in Pripyat, Ukraine, in Figure 5.6C). The extraction and sale of oil and gas on the global market is now a major source of income for Russia and several of the post-Soviet states, yet very little attention is being paid even today to the environmental impact of this activity (see Figure 5.6D).

Urban and Industrial Pollution

Urban and industrial pollution was ignored during Soviet times as cities expanded quickly—with workers flooding in from the countryside—to accommodate the new industries that often generated lethal levels of pollutants. During the authoritarian Soviet regime, citizens’ concerns about their living environment were suppressed, and this political environment did not allow for protests or an environmental movement as in North America and western Europe.

It is often difficult to link urban pollution directly to health problems because the sources of contamination are multiple and difficult to trace. Such nonpoint sources of pollution include untreated automobile exhaust, raw sewage, and agricultural chemicals that drain from fields into water supplies. In all urban areas of the region, air pollution resulting from the burning of fossil fuels is skyrocketing as more people purchase cars and as the industrial and transport sectors of the economy continue to grow.

Some cities were built around industries that produce harmful by-products. The former chemical weapons–manufacturing center of Dzerzhinsk has been listed by the nonprofit Blacksmith Institute as one of the ten most polluted cities in the world. It is competing with the city of Norilsk, where much of the vegetation has been killed off around the city’s metal smelting complex—the largest facility of its kind in the world (see Figure 5.6B). Norilsk was the most polluted city in Russia as recently as 2011.

The Globalization of Nuclear Pollution

Russia and the post-Soviet states are also home to extensive nuclear pollution, and its effects have spread globally. The world’s worst nuclear disaster occurred in Ukraine in 1986, when the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. The explosion severely contaminated a vast area in northern Ukraine, southern Belarus, and Russia. It spread a cloud of radiation over much of Central Europe, Scandinavia, and eventually the entire planet. In the area surrounding Chernobyl, more than 300,000 people were evacuated from their homes, and the town of Pripyat, which used to be home to 50,000 people, has been an abandoned ghost town since the disaster (see Figure 5.6C). The ultimate health effects are impossible to assess exactly. The United Nations estimates that 6000 people developed cancer due to the accident, although many believe the number to be much higher.

278. SAFETY AT THE CENTER OF NUCLEAR POWER OPERATIONS WORLDWIDE

When the Soviet Union collapsed, many of the post-Soviet states inherited nuclear facilities and even nuclear weapons. One such country is Kazakhstan (see Figure 5.3). Remote areas of eastern Kazakhstan used to serve as a testing ground for Soviet nuclear devices. The residents were sparsely distributed and no one took the trouble to protect them from nuclear radiation. A museum in Kazakhstan now displays the preserved remains of hundreds of deformed human fetuses and newborns. On the positive side, Kazakhstan has disarmed the nuclear warheads that it inherited from the Soviet Union and has worked with U.S. authorities to safeguard remaining nuclear weapons material. Kazakhstan plans to use its nuclear technology to become a global player in the nuclear energy sector. The country is already the single biggest producer of uranium in the world, generating 35 percent of the global production total. In addition to mining and exporting the raw material, Kazakhstan also wants to produce nuclear fuel both for global markets and domestic nuclear power plants, and develop commercial repositories for radioactive waste from other countries. However, the global appetite for nuclear expansion after the 2011 Fukushima accident in Japan remains uncertain, and no reliably safe system has yet been found for storing nuclear waste until it is no longer radioactive. Environmental and human rights NGOs have raised strong opposition, pointing to the region’s poor environmental track record. Kazakhstan’s population may also be suspicious of nuclear power because they have lived for a long time with land poisoned by radioactive waste.

The Globalization of Resource Extraction and Environmental Degradation

Russia and the post-Soviet states have considerable natural and mineral resources (see Figure 5.14). Russia itself has the world’s largest natural gas reserves, major oil deposits, and forests that stretch across the northern reaches of the continent. Russia also has major deposits of coal and industrial minerals such as iron ore and nickel. The Central Asian states share substantial deposits of oil and gas, which are centered on the Caspian Sea and extend east toward China. The value of all these resources is determined in the global marketplace, and their extraction affects the global environment.

Despite obvious environmental problems, cities like Norilsk (see Figure 5.6A), which sits on huge mineral deposits, continue to attract investment crucial to the new Russian economy. The area is rich in nickel—used in steel and other industrial products—and other minerals, such as copper. Norilsk Nickel, a company that was privatized at the end of communism and is now the largest producer of nickel in the world, dominates the city. Because the Russian government considers many minerals to be a strategic resource for the country, it limits foreign ownership in the industry. Partly because of that, and because of its extensive and profitable home base, Russian-controlled Norilsk Nickel has globalized, despite its poor environmental record, by purchasing mining operations in Australia, Botswana, Finland, the United States, and South Africa. The company employs over 80,000 people worldwide.

Water Issues

Water was once assumed to be inexhaustible and usable for endless purposes, while needing little maintenance. Now most countries in this region recognize it as a vital resource.

Rivers, Irrigation, and the Loss of the Aral Sea

To the south of Russia in the Central Asian states, glacially fed rivers have long served an irrigation role, supporting commercial cotton agriculture (see the discussion of the effects of global climate change on glaciers in Chapter 1, page 42). For millions of years, the landlocked Aral Sea, once the fourth-largest lake in the world, was fed by the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers, which bring snowmelt and glacial melt from the mountains in Kyrgyzstan and other nearby countries. Water was first diverted from the two rivers in the 1960s when the Soviet leadership ordered its use to irrigate millions of acres of cotton in naturally arid Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. So much water was consumed by these projects that within a few years, the Aral Sea had shrunk measurably (Figure 5.7A). By the early 1980s, no water at all from the two rivers was reaching the Aral Sea, and by 2001, the sea had lost 75 percent of its volume and had shrunk into three smaller lakes. The region’s huge fishing industry, on which the entire USSR population depended for some 20 percent of their protein, died out due to increasing water salinity. Once-active port cities were marooned many kilometers from the water. The decline and disappearance of the Aral Sea has been described as the largest human-made ecological disaster in history.

FIGURE 5.7 The decline and disappearance of the Aral Sea, 1960–2011. (A) Once the fourth-largest lake in the world, the Aral Sea is disappearing as a result of large-scale irrigation projects in Central Asia. Since 2005, however, Kazakhstan officials have made efforts to improve the situation, and the northern Aral Sea is slowly increasing in size and depth. (B) and (C), however, show that the southern sections of the sea continue to decline dramatically. The scale of both photos is the same. 5.7b Courtesy NASA Earth Observatory, 5.7c NASA Earth Observatory

The shrinkage of the Aral Sea has caused many human health problems. Winds that sweep across the newly exposed seabed pick up salt and chemical residues, creating poisonous dust storms. At the southern end of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan, 69 percent of the people report chronic illnesses caused by air pollution, a lack of clean water, and underdeveloped sanitation.

Efforts to increase water flows to the Aral Sea have been hampered by politics because the now-independent countries of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan share the sea. Uzbekistan, in particular, wants to continue massive irrigation programs, which have made it the world’s seventh-largest cotton grower. Nevertheless, some restorative actions have been taken. Kazakhstan, which relies on oil more than cotton for income, built a dam in 2005 to keep fresh water in the northern Aral Sea. By the following year, the water had risen 10 feet, and the fish catch was improving. Kazakh fishers note that there is now more open public debate about what to do next regarding the Aral Sea. In the southern Aral Sea, however, water levels remain very low (see Figure 5.7B, C). In Uzbekistan, for instance, where 44 percent of the workforce is employed in agriculture, the limitation of irrigation has forced economic diversification, and cotton production now makes up just 11 percent of the country’s exports, far less than the 45 percent it represented in 1990. 107. DYING SEA MAKES COMEBACK

Climate Change

Climate change is an issue in this region for many reasons. While high levels of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases are produced here, Russia’s forests also play a major role in absorbing global CO₂. Also, portions of the region have a medium level of vulnerability to the negative effects of a changing climate (shown on the map in Figure 5.8), but Central Asia, which is prone to drought and water scarcity, has high to extreme levels of vulnerability to climate change effects.

FIGURE 5.8 Photo Essay: Vulnerability to Climate Change in Russia and the Post-Soviet States Vulnerability to climate change is at medium levels throughout much of this region, but at high and extreme levels in Central Asia, which is highly exposed to drought and water scarcity. Both problems will worsen as temperatures rise and glaciers in the Pamirs and other mountains melt. The dependence of so many Central Asians on agriculture makes them very sensitive to these problems, and widespread poverty, combined with poorly developed disaster response systems, reduces their overall resilience to these and other disturbances. 5.8a Courtesy Martin Moos/Lonely Planet Images/Getty Images, 5.8b Courtesy Vyacheslav Oseledko/AFP/Getty Images, 5.8c Courtesy Andrew Peacock/Lonely Planet Images/Getty Images

Although Russia has reduced its CO₂ and other greenhouse gas emissions in recent years, it is still a major contributor of such emissions (see Figure 1.23). In fact, Russia has the third-highest rate of greenhouse gas emissions in the world. It is lagging in the use of energy-efficient technologies and many wasteful practices are common, such as burning off or “flaring” of natural gas that comes to the surface when oil wells are drilled. The results are higher greenhouse gas emissions per capita when compared to European countries; however, they are not as high as those in the United States. Russia has shown some willingness to limit its own emissions by, for example, signing international treaties, such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Copenhagen Accord, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Such treaties, however, use 1990 as a baseline for emissions. Russia’s compliance with international targets to reduce greenhouse emissions is largely an outcome of the country’s post-1990 economic decline after the end of communism. Lower levels of industrial output have meant lower emissions.

The dependence in Central Asia on irrigated agriculture using water from rivers that are fed by glaciers in the Pamirs and other mountains in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan (see Figure 5.8), leaves the region vulnerable to global climate change. In recent decades, the glaciers have shrunk because of more extreme temperature ranges and decreases in rain and snowfall. If the glaciers have a decreased capacity to act as water-storage systems that supply melted ice flow to the rivers, the rivers may run dry during the summer, when irrigation is most needed for growing crops. Because most rain falls in the mountains in the winter and spring, Central Asia’s agricultural systems would either have to adapt to a spring growing season (winters are too cold), or farmers would have to store water for use in the summer. Either proposition demands complex and expensive changes on a massive scale.