BUDAPEST: UN environmental experts have warned that the Black Sea, one of the most-heavily polluted waters in the world, could become a dead sea as the resumption of traffic along the Danube after the Balkan wars and intensified activity in the Caspian oilfields threatens to further destabilize its already degraded ecology.
The sea is already severely affected by discharges from oil refineries, chemical plants, paper mills and iron and steel works while nutrient-rich run-offs from farmland bordering rivers which discharge into the sea basin boost bacteria and growths of algae which create dense floating mats, which in turn block out sunlight and do much to wreck the sea’s ecological balance.
Thousands of the cities and towns which line these rivers and the sea’s coasts dump raw or poorly-treated sewage into its waters — cities on the Turkish coast do not treat their sewage at all — while DDT levels in some lagoons along the Romanian coast are reported 1,000 higher than in the Mediterranean.
Now a team from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) says the re-establishment of shipping along the Danube and the intensified traffic generated by the oil bonanza in the Caspian region could turn the Black Sea into a body of lifeless water unless more is done to halt the degradation.
The present six-year Black Sea Basin Strategic Partnership project focuses on preventing pollution entering the sea through its major tributaries — the Danube, the Dniester, the Dnieper, the Don and Kuban — which together carry the wastes of 23 countries spread across more than two million square kilometres of Europe and Asia Minor.
The Washington-based Global Environment Facility has just announced a $13.7 million scheme to restore wetlands of the Danube in Bulgaria.
GEF and UNEP specialists have already warned that the present Black Sea programme may fail unless it is considerably widened in the face of the relentless industrialization of the region.
Dams along the tributaries providing irrigation and hydroelectricity, for instance, have reduced the flow of water entering the sea. The Kuban, which flows through south western Russia into the adjoining Sea of Azov, has seen its volume cut by 58 per cent and as volumes of fresh water decreases, the salinity of the sea increases, killing off many of those fish which have managed to survive the aggressive growth of algae in the nutrient-rich water.
Even those fish which do survive are often unfit for human consumption because of the polluted waters in which they swim with the result that many Black Sea fishing boats lie idle, costing the industry about 150,000 jobs and $240 million a year in lost revenue.
Increasing oil shipments from the Caspian region heading for the Turkish Straits will further intensify environmental pressures along the overcrowded Black Sea shipping lanes, as westbound tankers make for the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara and out into the Aegean/Mediterranean via the Dardanelles, the world’s busiest and most dangerous waterways.
Some 6,500 oil tankers and 50,000 other vessels pass through the straits annually. About 15 per cent of them carry hazardous cargo. The present volume of traffic may well increase by half when the Caspian production fields come on stream by 2010.
Freight traffic on the river, some originating from as far away as the North Sea, will soon reach about 10,000 ships a year, which is why the first GEF project is concentrating on the Danube.
If precedents are anything to go by, the omens are not good. A previous attempt to persuade Black Sea neighbours to coordinate their industrial planning to try to reduce pollution with the help of various development aid funds ran into the sand.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.