Press Release, 14.10.2020

Yabloko Chairman Nikolai Rybakov sent to Russian President Vladimir Putin a roadmap to change environmental policy against the backdrop of events in Kamchatka. The head of Yabloko proposes, among other things, creating a federal register of objects of accumulated environmental damage, instructing the government to amend the regulation plan in the field of ecology and nature management, and permitting NGOs to conduct environmental monitoring.

In his letter, Rybakov recalls that the disaster in Kamchatka is another episode in a series of accidents that happened this year, such as fuel spills in Norilsk and Khatanga, fuel pollution of the Angara and forest fires.

“Whatever the reasons for each of these accidents could be, some decisions must be made as soon as possible to change the environmental policy in Russia,” the head of Yabloko emphasised in his address.

The Chairman of the Yabloko party suggests the following measures:

– form and publish a publicly available and constantly updated federal register of objects of accumulated environmental damage, including hazardous waste landfills. The register must contain objective information on the operational environmental situation at each facility;

– no later than January 1, 2021, adopt changes to the state programme “Environmental Protection”, expanding it with measures for a detailed inventory for each constituent entity of the Russian Federation. Provide for the obligation to correct data based on appeals from citizens and public organisations on newly identified objects of accumulated environmental damage;

– form a ministry of environmental protection within the government of Russia;

– provide daily monitoring of the environmental situation on water bodies in the areas where transport means carry dangerous goods;

– form and promptly update a unified database of sunken objects that pose a potential threat to the environment (in cooperation with the UN);

– increase the expenditures of the federal, regional and local budgets to support activities for the protection of specially protected natural areas;

– develop and maintain mechanisms of public control over the environment, including through a system of public inspectors;

– increase administrative fines for offenses in the field of environmental protection and natural resource use (by three times for the lower margin, and by 20 times for the upper margin);

– adopt a new edition of the Forest Code within two years; restore the system of forestry management bodies and state forest protection bodies, which existed before 2006, as well as the institute of forest inspectors;

– organise a federal laboratory for conducting operational analyses when detecting cases of environmental pollution;

– organise modern monitoring of the environment in each constituent entity of the Russian Federation and publish the data online, support public initiatives in the field of monitoring and control of environmental quality;

– provide conditions for the creation of a non-state system for the collection and processing of hazardous waste from the population and enterprises;

– instruct the government to amend, no later than December 1, 2020, the section of the national action plan “Improving the regulation in the field of ecology and nature management”; abolish the practices of weakening of the norms of environmental legislation, including not to cancel public hearings on discussion of the data of environmental impact assessment, not to increase the period of compensatory reforestation and return to the discussion of previously adopted decisions within the framework of the  implementation of the plan in other sections, including on the issues of construction of transport infrastructure near Lake Baikal;

– stop persecution and pressure on independent environmental Russian NGOs, which also perform the functions of independent public control of objects of high environmental risk (at least 20 leading environmental organisations in Russia were included into the register of NGOs).

“We offer you to support these aspects of work and give instructions to the relevant state authorities to start implementing them,” Nikolai Rybakov noted in his address to the President.

Nikolai Rybakov has been working in the field of environment for many years.  From 2008 to 2015, he headed the Bellona Environmental Human Rights Centre in St. Petersburg.