The Eastern Front:

Better protection from the main land-based threats to the Baltic Sea and building monitoring capacity in Russia

The main areas of the recently completed HELCOM BALTHAZAR Project were to improve the protection of the Baltic Sea from the main land-based threats: hazardous
waste and agricultural nutrient loading. The successful work will be carried on back-to-back within the new BASE Project which kicked off on 1 June 2012.

 

The EU-funded BALTHAZAR pilot project (2009-2012) has focused exclusively on St. Petersburg and the Leningrad and Kaliningrad Oblasts of the Russian Federation. The agricultural pilots included both single farm and large-scale manure management measures and collaborated at municipal and district levels. See here another Newsletter story on manure management.

 

Furthermore, the pilots included investing in machinery for more efficient slurry use, and assistance in tunnel composting manure.

 

“The BALTHAZAR results have already been feeding into other fertile processes, such as the Regional Programme on manure management and the initiative by Nordic Environment Finance Corporation (NEFCO), Northern Dimension Environmental Partnership (NDEP) and the Finnish Ministry of the Environment. HELCOM has already acknowledged the significant positive effect of the BALTHAZAR project and that the outputs in general will greatly help planning of specific activities in the near future,” says Mr. Leonid Korovin from St. Petersburg Public Organization “Ecology and Business”, the Russian Partner in the Project.

  

Safer end for hazardous lamps of Kaliningrad

Another example of the many activities within BALTHAZAR Project was carried out in Kaliningrad Region and concerning improved treatment of mercury containing waste, especially fluorescent lamps from households as there is no official system for collecting these types of waste in place.

 

Best practices for raising awareness and collecting waste for treatment were carried out in altogether three pilot municipalities and environmentally sound treatment equipment was established. The information campaign in the city of Kaliningrad has been done in cooperation with a German-Russian project covering thereby in total the majority of the population in the whole Kaliningrad region. 

Better Measuring of Pollution Loads

In addition, BALTHAZAR has worked with capacity building within environmental monitoring in order to have more comparable and reliable results for assessments, and to improve reporting for HELCOM Pollution Load Compilations from Russia, especially concerning data on nutrients from diffuse sources.

 

The sampling carried out in late 2011 within this monitoring activity in the River Luga revealed a potentially significant source of phosphorus to the Baltic Sea downstream from the town of Kingisepp, North-West Russia. In June 2012, a fertilizer plant  located in Kingisepp, informed about measures to stop leakage of phosphorus to the River Luga which have led to the decreased concentrations also verified by BALTHAZAR investigations during spring 2012. Russia has already informed to continue the monitoring of the area.

 

The availability of regular monitoring data from diffuse and other sources on the nutrient concentrations and discharges of rivers is of key importance, and the new Project BASE, also funded by the EU, will keep this a high priority.

 

The aim of the two-year BASE project is to further support implementation of the Baltic Sea Action Plan (BSAP) in Russia and provide input to the upcoming HELCOM Ministerial Meeting next year.

The BASE project will address in total as many as three priority areas of the HELCOM BSAP: eutrophication, hazardous substances, and biodiversity and nature protection, as well as monitoring activities.