#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. Pollution of the Arctic seas and the organization of ecological tourism in the Russian Far North became the main topics of round tables at the Big Ocean September International Festival, organized at the initiative of the Russian Ministry of Nature Federal Reserve Center.
The famous Russian oceanologist, geophysicist Alexander Gorodnitsky, who spoke at the opening of the festival at VDNKh, said that the ecology of the World Ocean is the most important thing today.
“Our planet atmosphere is formed in the world ocean. The quality of the air we all breathe depends on the state of the environment in ocean waters. The ocean gives us so much. This is what we can live with for many decades”, the goarctic.ru portal quotes the scientist.
When discussing the topic of water pollution, the participants said that soon in the World Ocean, which occupies 70 percent of our planet’s surface, there will be more plastic than fish.
The pandemic has added medical masks to plastic: last year, about 5.5 thousand tons of them were took out of ocean waters. Packages from food products, tires, synthetic fabrics, and the remains of fishing tackle, in which up to 300 thousand whales and dolphins are entangled each year, float in Russian waters.
The director of Taimyr Nature Reserves directorate, Konstantin Prosekin, who took part in the roundtable, added to this list the Soviet past hangover in the form of old spills of oil products and household waste left over from the activities of the military and Arctic explorers of past years.
According to the Taimyr Nature Reserves FBSI website, Konstantin Prosekin proposed to amend the legal regulation that could help attract big business to finance the elimination of accumulated damage in the Arctic zone of our country.
He also noted the need to form a unified position on the organization of tourism in specially protected natural areas in the Arctic.
Earlier, we reported that Forbes included Nornickel’s tourism projects in the list of the world’s most ambitious ones.
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Text: Varvara Sosnovskaya, Photo: Alexander Zheleznyak, goarctic.ru, videcam.ru, Russian Ministry of Natural Resources press center
