TED Case Studies

Black Sea Pollution and Tourism

IDENTIFICATION
LEGAL CLUSTERS
GEOGRAPHIC CLUSTERS
TRADE CLUSTERS
ENVIRONMENT CLUSTERS
OTHER FACTORS

I. Identification

1. The Issue

In February, 1992, members of the Commonwealth of Independent States signed the interrepublican agreement On Cooperation in the Area of Ecology. Absent from this meeting was Ukraine, one of the more environmentally damaged areas of the former Soviet Union. Included in the damage is the Crimean Region, a popular vacation spot on the Black Sea, and an area where Western investment in the growing tourist industry is both anticipated and badly needed. As pollution continues in the area, tourism both in the Ukraine and in bordering coastal states will suffer.

2. Description

At a February 8, 1992 meeting of members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in Moscow, participants signed an interrepublican agreement On Cooperation in the Area of Ecology. Participating states recognized that borders between governments do not coincide with natural ecological and basin boundaries, adding that economic activity in one state must not cause damage to the environment, the public's quality of life, or economic activity in other states. The parties resolved, among other points to:
(1) promote environmental protection through the drafting and enforcement of environmental legislation and regulations;
(2) harmonize methodologies, procedures and standards
of environmental assessment and regulation and to make
them compatible with international practice;
(3) pursue joint environmental research and protection
programs, including the dismantling of chemical and
nuclear weapons;
(4) create an interstate ecological information system and common list of endangered species;
(5) form an interstate ecological council composed of
the environment ministers of the participating states;
(6) finance an interstate ecological fund aimed
primarily at rendering disaster assistance.

Following up on the original Moscow meeting, minus the Ukraine, the environment ministers from seven CIS states met in Minsk in July, 1992 where they signed a protocol capitalizing on an inter-state ecological fund with an initial sum of 60 million rubles. The ministers committed their states to make yearly contributions to the fund at the rate of 0.05 percent of their gross national product. The participating states were Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The Ukraine participated in this meeting only as an observer and did not commit itself to any legislation.

Ukraine suffered as a result of Soviet planning and subsequent ecological problems. While Ukraine accounted for just 3 percent of the total territory of the former Soviet Union, it had such a heavy concentration of chemical plants and had been so intensively industrialized that it provided 25 percent of the Soviet gross national product. Additionally, over 1,000 dangerous chemical enterprises, 93 percent of whose output was exported, were based in Ukraine.

Commonly referred to as the breadbasket of the (former) Soviet Union, Ukraine provided 23 percent of the agricultural production in the country. Recently, however, about one-third of all Ukraine's arable land has suffered from soil erosion, while chemical substances continue to contaminate and further deplete its value; over the past twenty-five years, 1.25 million hectares of arable land have been lost due to industrial expansion. The coal industry alone has accounted for the ruination of 260,000 hectares, most of which cannot be returned to agricultural production. Close to 246,000 acres of the famous Ukrainian black soil have been contaminated by radioactive isotopes. Of fifty-five farms in twenty different oblasts (Ukraine is divided into twenty-four "oblasts") that were the subject of a 1988 study, thirty-three were found to be contaminated with pesticides in the spring and twenty-five in the fall.

Ukrainian air is no better off than the land. Air pollution in 102 Ukrainian cities is at least ten times higher than officially permitted rates, threatening more than 50 million people. For comparison, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that each year U.S. industry emits 2.7 billion pounds of toxic chemicals into the air. Ukraine alone, however, discharged 22 billion pounds of toxic substances into the atmosphere during 1988. The 800 million pounds of toxic waste released into the air by a single Ukrainian city, Zaporizhzhya, equals about one-third of total U.S. emissions. Fixed terrestrial sources in Ukraine "accounted for 11.5 million tons of atmospheric wastes yearly, composed mainly of carbon, sulfur and nitrous oxides."

Ukrainian waterways, its rivers and seas, are in desperate trouble. In 1988, 2,634 million cubic meters of contaminated water were released into the rivers of Ukraine, of which 516 million cubic meters were completely untreated and 2,118 million cubic meters insufficiently treated. Sulfides and chlorates made up the bulk of the dangerous contaminants. Drinking water in many regions of southern Ukraine and in the Donbass Basin does not conform to health standards. Additionally, the number of rivers in the country has declined from 40,000 to 25,000 in recent years, as a direct result of ecological misuse. More than five million tons of salt are dumped into Ukraine's rivers every year; scientists have found that salinity in water leads to genetic defects and causes severe illness, such as tumors and heart disease. So polluted are Ukraine's rivers that most of them no longer freeze in winter.

Of particular concern are the Dnipro and Dniester Rivers, the first and second largest rivers in the Ukraine. Concentrations of oil, nitric acid and phenols in the Dnipro have reached catastrophic levels. At least 105 industrial and agricultural enterprises continue to dump about 40.5 million cubic meters of contaminated water into the Dniester River each year. The river is the chief source of drinking water for the 2.6 million people in the port city of Odessa and the region surrounding it. What elevates the problem further is that both rivers spill into the Black Sea.

Located in Southern Ukraine in the Crimean Oblast, contamination from the Crimean region combined with the inflow of river pollution has left the Black Sea and the surrounding area an ecological nightmare. The greatest peril facing the Black Sea is eutrophication -- the disappearance of dissolved oxygen without which fish die, algae blossom and harmful bacteria multiply rapidly. Additionally, the level of pollution from hydrogen sulfide, the substance most damaging to water quality, rose by two-thirds in the Black Sea from 1935 to 1985. Taken together, the survival of an aquatic ecosystem and a developed tourist industry in the Black Sea region is in grave danger.

The Crimea has a long-standing reputation as a balneological (therapeutic baths) resort. There are a total of 330 sanatoriums in the Crimea while the main therapeutic remedies are the local air, sun and sea. Western firms are expected to invest in coastal recreational projects such as hotels, boarding houses and camping grounds and assist in creating a true service infrastructure that will ultimately benefit the economy. The ruination of both the Crimean air, land and sea threatens the growing 11.4 million ruble leisure business and future Western investment in this field.

Ukraine's seeming lack of desire to cooperate with other CIS states in cleaning up the region may create additional environmental legal problems. Ukraine's unwillingness to participate in a meaningful way in a joint environmental program, no matter how beneficial, "points to the rapidly increasing significance of the sovereignty issue in the post-Soviet era." It is ironic that the environment has been put on the "back-burner" in the Ukraine since it arguably was the environment which sparked the independence movement:

...traumatized by Chernobyl and its aftermath, ecological consciousness became part of our national consciousness recalls a senior leader of Rukh, adding demonstrations against nuclear power were part of the largest protest against the (Soviet) empire itself.

3. Related Cases

CHERNOB case
BARREL case
JELLYWAX case
BOSPORUS case
MEDIT case
ALBANIA case

4. Draft Author: Renata D. Hron

II. Legal Clusters

5. Discourse and Status: DISagreement and INPROGress

Public outcry could force the Ukrainian government to adopt strict environmental laws. A proposed nuclear reactor in the Crimean region was stalled and ultimately stopped due to public demonstrations against the project. In the fall of 1988, the Crimean Komsomol newspaper published a questionnaire asking whether the Crimean nuclear power plant was needed. Of thirty-thousand signatures obtained, only two of the respondents were in favor of building the station. Although the interrepublican agreement On Cooperation in the Area of Ecology has been signed, details regarding implementation of the agreement's goals have not been established or instilled.

6. Forum and Scope: CIS and REGIONal

7. Decision Breadth:12 (CIS and Ukraine)

A unilateral case involving Ukraine is also probable, should the government succumb to public pressure.

8. Legal Standing: TREATY

The agreement should be classified as a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), thereby a type of International Treaty.

III. Geographic Clusters

9. Geographic Locations

a. Geographic Domain:EUROPE

b. Geographic Site: East Europe [EEUR]

c. Geographic Impact: UKRaine

10. Sub-National Factors:NO

11. Type of Habitat:OCEAN

IV. Trade Clusters

12. Type of Measure: Regulatory Standard [REGSTD]

13. Direct v. Indirect Impacts: INDirec

14. Relation of Trade Measure to Environmental Impact

a. Directly Related to Product: YES MANY

b. Indirectly Related to Product: YES TOURism

c. Not Related to Product: YES

d. Related to Process: YES Pollution sea [POLS}

15. Trade Product Identification:TOURism

The government budget for 1993 for Recreation and Culture activities, in Ukrainian karbovanets, was 353 billion. The total projected expenditures for the same time period was 5, 616 billion karbovanets or 6 percent of the total government budget.

Just over three-hundred private cooperatives in 1990 employed four thousand Ukrainians in the leisure field. While this appears to be a small amount, the figure is for private cooperatives only. Almost the entire the tourist industry in 1990 was handled through the state (via Intourist), for which figures are unavailable. The aforementioned figure, however, is certainly on the rise as investment in Crimea arrives and private cooperatives legally expand. The public dining private cooperative, a part of the whole tourist industry, employed an additional 4,500 people for the same time period.

16. Economic Data

The travel and tourism industry is the world's second largest industry, after agriculture, with 1990 employment at over 101 million people worldwide, and gross sales exceeding $2 trillion. Total worldwide 1990 government funding of national government tourism organizations equaled $2,418 million for the top twenty countries reporting. The top countries in this grouping were Italy, Spain, France, Korea and Mexico, with the United States occupying the 20th position. Tourism will continue to be a major growing economic factor in the world with real growth rates of 4.3-5.0 percent in the 1990s. The top five earning countries are United States, France, Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom in 1989 and the top five spending countries were the United States, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and France. International travel services ranked as the largest U.S. export in 1990, as international travelers coming to the United States bring $52.8 billion in revenues.

17. Impact of Trade Restriction:NA

In 1990, Soviet scholars calculated annual economic costs of environmental damage at 15 to 17 percent of national income. Some of the larger losses include wind and water erosion and wastage of natural resources which combined as a 25 billion-ruble-a-year loss, an amount equal to earnings forgone from forestry, fisheries and fur trapping. Additionally, the overall economic toll of environmental abuse during the 1980s ran eleven to fifteen times above the amounts spent on environmental protection. These calculations do not even include the 27 billion-ruble-a-year drain in sick pay and missing output due to the illnesses, many of them related to unclean air and water, that kept four million workers from their jobs each day.

18. Industry Sector:TOURism

19. Exporters and Importers: MANY and UKRaine

V. Environment Clusters

20. Environmental Problem Type: Pollution Sea [POLS]

21. Name, Type, and Diversity of Species

Name: MANY

Type: MANY

Diversity: Sustainable yield of 1,250,000 metric tons/year (Mediterranean and Black Seas)

22. Resource Impact and Effect: HIGH and 100s of years

23. Urgency of Problem: MEDium and REGULatory

Journalist Volodymyr Kolinko notes in a recent article that "90% of the Black Sea can now be declared dead, a victim of hydrogen sulfide gas that is continuing to rise from the depths of the seas and contaminate its upper layers." Continuing, Kolinko predicts that "the Black Sea will be totally destroyed by the year 2040 if the present trend continues." Other countries in the region add to the problem (see BARREL and MEDIT cases).

24. Substitutes: Biodegradable [BIODG] products

VI. Other Factors

25. Culture:NO

26. Trans-Boundary Issues:YES

The problem is shared by the many countries that border the Black Sea.

27. Rights:YES

In many respects, this problem is the result of a lack of human rights. The lack of rights silenced any would-be protests to the ecological calamity facing the Black Sea and the Ukraine.

28. Relevant Literature