Skerries were taken into action – Newspaper Kommersant No. 20 (7465) dated 02/03/2023
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Greenpeace Russia is preparing an appeal to the Prosecutor General’s Office with a request to protect the territorial integrity of the Ladoga Skerries National Park. The reason was the draft of a new regulation on a special protected natural area (SPNA) submitted for public discussion. Ecologists are confident that the Ministry of Natural Resources plans to exclude from the national park an area of more than 2,000 hectares. According to Kommersant, last spring the little-known Institute of Ecology and Land Use LLC turned to Russian President Vladimir Putin with a request to provide this site “for recreational activities.” Environmentalists remind that the current legislation prohibits the exclusion of land from the national parks, and warn: the adoption of the document will create a dangerous precedent for the entire reserve system.
The Ministry of Natural Resources of the Russian Federation has published a draft of a new regulation on the Ladoga Skerries National Park. Ecologists noted that it is planned to exclude the peninsula near the settlements of Reskula, Kortela and Rautalahti from the composition of the protected area, according to the maps attached to the document. According to the Greens, we are talking about an area of more than 2,000 hectares. This territory does not have a toponymic name, but is referred to in official correspondence as the Rautalahti Peninsula.
Created in 2017, the Ladoga Skerries National Park is located in the Lahdenpohsky, Sortavalsky and Pitkyarantsky regions of the Republic of Karelia (northern and northwestern shores of Lake Ladoga). In 2020, the Ministry of Natural Resources approved the regulation on the protected area. According to the map of the national park, the Rautalahti peninsula is part of it.
According to Kommersant’s information, in May 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin was asked to exclude the Rautalahti Peninsula from the national park by the Institute of Ecology and Land Use LLC. Director of the LLC Irina Ghukasyan informed the head of state about “recreational activities with the possibility of partial development with recreational facilities.” Ms. Ghukasyan specified in her letter that the company was engaged in the implementation of environmental protection measures during the construction of Olympic facilities. According to SPARK-Interfax, the LLC is owned equally by Mikael Aramyan and Aleksey Khodyakov. The website of the “Institute of Land Use Ecology” reports that this “research and production design bureau has been successfully working in the field of ecology and environmental protection for more than five years.” In particular, it mentions the implementation of “environmental monitoring of the bridge across the Kerch Strait.” Kommersant sent several inquiries to the company, but did not receive a response.
According to Kommersant’s information, the head of state instructed the Ministry of Natural Resources to work out this proposal. The department began with a request to the subordinate All-Russian Research Institute “Ecology”: is the peninsula a part of the national park? The scientists answered in the affirmative. Both letters in question are at the disposal of Kommersant.
In June, the Ministry of Natural Resources of the Russian Federation told Kommersant that it was studying the possibility of excluding the Rautalahti Peninsula from the national park in order to “prevent damage to nature in the first place.” The department confirmed the receipt of a letter with a proposal to allow recreational activities there, but the ministry did not specify who it was from. At the end of January, when environmentalists started talking about plans to change the purpose of the peninsula, Kommersant again turned to the environmental department for clarification. However, this time the Ministry of Natural Resources, without answering the question about the exclusion of the site from the protected areas, said that they plan to clarify the boundaries of the national park. The area of the protected area during its creation, officials explained, was 122 thousand hectares, however, the decree “did not set boundaries, did not approve the coordinate description of their location, only the municipal districts of Karelia, within whose boundaries the protected area is located, its total area and land categories were indicated included in the composition”. Based on the results of land management work to include its boundaries in the USRN, carried out in 2020-2021, the Ministry of Natural Resources revealed a shortage of 5.2 thousand hectares. In this regard, the department, together with the government of Karelia, is carrying out “work to clarify the boundaries of the national park in order to bring the actual area to the characteristics established in the act on the creation of the national park.”
The explanatory note to the regulation on the national park published on February 1, 2023 also refers to the clarification of the boundaries of the Ladoga Skerries. However, ecologists point out that from the map attached to the document it follows that the Rautalahti peninsula is no longer part of the protected area. But it includes forest areas of a similar area near the villages of Ryuttu and Impilahti.
“The boundaries of territories, zones, land plots must always be substantiated in an essential way, and the value of the area cannot be the subject of certain manipulations with the boundaries of objects that make it possible to exclude some parts from their territories and include others instead of the “deficit” of the area,” said a member of the commission. on Ecological Welfare under the RF OP Anton Khlynov. — The decision to include additional territories in the boundaries of the national park must be justified from a natural and ecological point of view and definitely cannot be the result of any “compensation” for those areas that are from there for some reason decided to exclude. Mr. Khlynov also points out that the site proposed for exclusion belongs to a protected area – its reduction is prohibited by the law “On Specially Protected Natural Territories”.
Greenpeace Russia expert Mikhail Kreindlin also points out that the current legislation prohibits the exclusion of territories from the composition of national parks and changing the purpose of protected areas. He warns that the decision to “cut a piece out of the national park without any permission and present it under the guise of clarifying the boundaries of the territory” will set a dangerous precedent for the entire reserve system. Mr. Kreindlin adds that the sites that they want to join the national park in return have no ecological value – clear-cutting has been carried out there for several years.
Greenpeace Russia is preparing an appeal to the Prosecutor General’s Office, in which it will point out the mentioned violations of environmental legislation and ask them to take measures to protect the territorial integrity of the Ladoga Skerries. If, nevertheless, the Ministry of Natural Resources approves the document, the greens plan to file a lawsuit with the court.
It should be noted that attempts to redraw protected lands have been made before. For example, the project of laying an understudy of the Shchelkovo highway through the territory of the Losiny Ostrov national park (Moscow and the Moscow region) has been discussed since 2013. In March 2019, former Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev instructed the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Natural Resources to work out the issue of changing the boundaries of the national park. However, the departments in response admitted: within the framework of the current legislation, it is “impossible” to solve the problem. A similar story with the Yugyd Va National Park (Komi), on the territory of which the Chudnoye gold deposit is located. The Ministry of Natural Resources and the government of the republic have repeatedly tried to remove Chudnoye from the national park. However, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation on the suit of Greenpeace forbade changing the boundaries of the national park.
Amendments that allow changing the boundaries of protected areas regularly pop up as part of public discussions or are submitted by individual deputies to the State Duma. However, the matter has not yet reached the adoption of norms. It is the lack of a mechanism for changing the boundaries of federal protected areas, the greens are sure, that prevented officials and businessmen from implementing projects in protected areas.
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