Greenpeace activists protested at the headquarters of a Russian government agency today, accusing it of trying to silence its own environmental experts who are opposed to plans for the world's biggest oil pipeline, scheduled to be built through a World Heritage Site around Lake Baikal.
Over 80 per cent of the experts, commissioned to assess the environmental impact of building the 4,200 km pipeline, rejected the proposal because of its proximity to one of the world's most fragile ecosystems, Lake Baikal, which has been a World Heritage Site since 1996.
The environmental impact assessment (EIA) of the proposed pipeline was commissioned by Russia's Federal Service for Ecological, Technological and Atomic Supervision in November 2005. The agency convened a panel of 52 top Russian scientists, who delivered their assessment on 24th January 2006. 43 out of 52 of them signed a statement concluding that the pipeline would have a negative impact, highlighting that it would be built just 800 metres away from Lake Baikal, and poses "a great potential danger to the lake".
For more information, please, contact Roman Vazhenkov or Evgeny Usov of Greenpeace Russia:
Tel/fax: +7 (495) 926-5045
mobile +7 903 739 49 57
e-mail: rvazhenk@ru.greenpeace.org.
Notes:
Lake Baikal is a place of superlatives: the deepest, the oldest, the clearest, the cleanest, the highest level of biodiversity, the largest volume (20 per cent of the total) of freshwater in the world, and home to freshwater seals. For this reason Lake Baikal is on the World Natural Heritage List of Unesco.
