Moves to save the not-so-blue Danube
An environmental group has listed the opaque, brown river as one of the world's 10 most threatened.
from the March 30, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 2
Page 1 | 2
"When these countries joined the EU, they also had to adopt new environmental policies and regulations, which has had the benefit of improving the overall water quality situation in the Danube basin," says Ivan Zavadsky, director of the Danube/Black Sea Regional Program in Vienna, a joint project of the United Nations and World Bank that has pumped $70 million into cleanup projects in the region.
New sewage treatment plants have been built in recent years, while many of the most polluting factories and agricultural enterprises collapsed in the early 1990s. As a result, Mr. Zavadsky notes, concentrations of phosphorus and nitrogen – the nutrients that ravaged the Black Sea – have gone down 50 percent and 20 percent respectively since 1989.
"We're witnessing the first signs of a recovery of the Black Sea ecosystem," Zavadsky says. "But the situation remains on a knife's edge."
János Zlinszky of the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe is concerned that the gains could be lost if the region's economic recovery outpaces its environmental investments. "Romania and Bulgaria have just joined the EU," he says – which means they no longer face the EU's tough agricultural trade barriers. "If they decide to focus on intensive agriculture rather than the organic market, we could see great increases in fertilizer and pesticide use."
WWF's primary concern is an EU plan to improve navigation on the middle and lower Danube, an effort they say will destroy some of the last ecologically sound portions of the river. "They want to make the Danube into a 'highway to the sea' but they are not taking into account how it will affect the ecological status of the river," Ms. Bratrich says. "We shouldn't make the same mistakes in the lower Danube that we [Western European nations] made in the upper stretch."
1 | Page 2
) |
|
RSS feed
