Lake Baikal is located in eastern Siberia and is definitely one of the most beautiful natural wonders. Baikal is the deepest (1637m) and the oldest lake in the world, its age is more than 25 million years. It stores 20% of the world’s fresh water. Apart from these amazing features, Baikal is the cleanest and clearest lake with the biggest biodiversity. Just imagine, more than 2635 species of animals and plants are found there and 75% of them are not met anywhere else! Baikal is included in the list of Unesco natural heritage. And here you can see some pictures of its beauty, taken by Russian photojournalist Toroshev Victor Vasil’evich. As was mentioned before, Baikal is really a huge lake and it has a lot of inflow rivers and streams along which numerous inhabited localities are met (villages, small towns). Together, all these settlements dump around 15 million cubic meters of waste per year in rivers and later ends up in Baikal. Sewage treatment plants and industrial wastewater facilities in localities near Lake Baikal are either non-existent or have a very poor quality. And this is a very sad fact. The biggest inflow river Selenga, unfortunately, also contributes to the pollution of the clearest lake. Several wood-treatment and paper plants, metallurgical enterprise and power plant are built on its banks. A lot, isn’t it? Of course, wastewater is dumped into Selenga. And direct dumps are only one problem, because apart from wastewater these plants have emissions of SO2 and SO3 into atmosphere and later this causes acid rains in the neighborhood. As a result, water in the lake becomes acidic which affect flora and fauna of the lake. Agriculture and soil erosion also affect the quality of water in Lake Baikal. Nutrients that are used in fields are washed out by rain and get into the lake. And it leads to eutrophication - decrease in the amount of oxygen in water. And on the pictures below you can see dreadful consequences of the Baikal’s pollution. To solve some problem, first of all it is needed to find its source. And in the case with Baikal it is not only the people’s irresponsibility and negligence to the world’s natural heritage, but also several political aspects. Here it is important to say that Russia is divided into several Federal Districts. Let’s have a look at the map of Siberian Federal District where Lake Baikal is situated. As you can understand, the blue spot is Lake Baikal and it is between two regions - The Republic of Buryatia and Irkutsk region. None of the regions want to take responsibility of the pollution and that is why no money is allocated to the improvement of factories’ treatment facilities. Also ecological departments in regions do not want to make ecological monitoring and clean polluted areas. However, the problem is not only because of two regions, which can not divide spheres of influence, but also because of Central Federal District (the region with Moscow), which does not allocate enough money to Federal Districts that are behind Urals. That is why the regions are trying to save money and do not spend them on things which in their opinion are not important. Fortunately, people do understand that ecology in the region and condition of the unique lake is important and go to strikes and meetings to raise awareness about situation with the Baikal. And this is quite productive method because, people living in the region have achieved closing of the old pulp and paper mill, the specifications of which were terrible and could not be improved (the mill was built in 1967 and did not have significant developments and improvements since then).
To conclude, right steps are undertaken to save the unique natural heritage. According to interviews done by «Vedomosti» (Russia), treatment facilities of factories and plants will be updated by the beginning of 2018. Heads of the regions know about ecological problems and with the help of caring and initiative people the statues of the cleanest and clearest lake will be saved. http://www.ecoproblems.org/2009/01/blog-post_6374.html |
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May 2019
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