|
|
|
 |
||
SECTION 7. ENVIRONMENTAL PACKAGE PLAN DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION Now a number of projects on reduction of harmful impact of particular components and damaged environment rehabilitation are developed and implemented in the republic. In particular, here it is possible to relate rehabilitation of damaged land (oil spills liquidation, re-cultivation of oil-fields, conserved and removed from operation, etc.), restoration (at the expense of reduction of pasturable loading) of degraded pastures etc. However, these efforts are isolated, and not consolidated. These tasks should be one of the CEP basic priorities in cooperation with the NEAP/SD programs, developed for the Atyrau and Mangystau regions. The analysis of national ecological legislation specifies insufficiency of legal measures in the field of management and control. By its content the Water Code of the Republic of Kazakhstan (1993) is not a market economy law. It weakly developed the economic mechanism and the governmental management mechanism, and standards allowing water use for business activities were not reflected there. In the overall the issues of control of water use and protection were not solved in a satisfactory way. Standards of water protection from pollution, littering, and depletion in the Water Code of the Republic of Kazakhstan (1993) are mainly of a declarative nature. Standardization of water quality and maximum admissible discharges of harmful substances to water. Specific features of legal protection of seas from pollution, oil contamination of water bodies, and other issues have been omitted. The required legal acts on preventing and liquidation of the sea pollution are missing. Only sanitary rules and standards of coastal sea water protection from pollution at places of water use by the population approved in 1988 by the Ministry of Health of the USSR are being applied. But they need to be revised by the Republic of Kazakhstan. There is an urgent need for legal regulation of these issues of oil pollution of water, and these acts must comply with international Conventions which the Republic of Kazakhstan has signed. Presently regulatory legal acts of the Republic of Kazakhstan determining environmental, sanitary-hygienic, and other requirements to the economic and other activities affecting the state of lands as a result of their pollution are not available. The standards for the quality of land while its economic, municipal and radioactive pollution and also some other types of biological pollution are missing. In the overall the state of the environmental legislation of the Republic of Kazakhstan is assessed as satisfactory one, guaranteeing prevention and liquidation of the air, water, and soil pollution. But it is necessary to note that for ensuring a fuller and more effective legal framework it is required to enhance control of the fulfillment of the current legal acts, and develop number of new legal regulatory acts. One of the reasons of unsatisfactory activities on fulfillment of the legislation is instability of the organs of the governmental environmental management system and governmental control in the field of environmental protection. The economic instruments stimulating rational environmental management are not used effectively enough. Now not all-natural components are subject to payments for use of natural resources (atmospheric air, recreational resources etc.). Determining the amount of taxes for mineral wealth is of a closed nature and is implemented through contracts approved by the Government that does not allow to reimburse expenses on their conservation. Among the drawbacks of the current system of payments for the use of nature there is an incomplete inclusion of all the types of pollution (a full scope of environmental and social losses is not taken into account), weak incentives for rational use of nature (payments for natural resources do not reflect their real cost), weak development, imperfect legal regulatory basis, and an incomplete legal base. Nature Protection Funds also do not fulfill their main function of funding environmental resources. In 1998 investments from local environmental funds made up only 469 million tenge mainly due to non-refunding from the Republican and local budgets into which these funds are included. In the current regulation on the funds as of today there are no incentives for raising funds. There is no budget transparency of these funds. In the republic there are certain achievements in the field of legislative and normative guarantees of ecological safety in region, but it is doubtless that they demand further development and improvement both at national and interstate level. The prompt completion of development and signing by the Caspian littoral states of the Framework Convention on the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Caspian Sea should create, with possible interstate agreements, a basis for development of the uniform normative documents ensuring coordinated approaches both to assessment of environmental state and to implementation of measures to ensure ecological safety, including first of all, impact assessment in the transboundary context, joint (on interstate or bilateral basis) ecological expertise of the projects related to the Caspian ecosystem safety. It is necessary to mention, from the legal acts prepared in republics related directly to the considered problem, the bill " On the State Ecological Control " submitted for consideration to the Parliament and the draft laws " On Wastes " and " On Payments for Use of Biological Resources”, approved by the Government to be submitted to the Parliament. The acceptance of these laws in the certain degree will strengthen the legal status of nature protection bodies. Simultaneously, the development of methodical and normative documents will proceed in republic, the list of which is large enough and can be illustrated as already prepared: " Provision on the order of organization, implementation and financing of monitoring control of water and soil quality of the Northern Caspian in places of exploration drilling of bore-wells on the shelf of the Caspian sea "; The draft Standard of RK" Methods of evaluation of toxicity of the Northern Caspian water by biotesting on algae "; The draft Standard of RK " Methods of evaluation of toxicity of the Northern Caspian water by biotesting on fish ". The problems of coastal planning, developed within the framework of CEP, should be solved in close coordination with the NEAP/SD proposals and development on the Atyrau and Mangystau regions, however, with precise orientation of priorities to interests of the Caspian ecosystem and to those contingents of the population, which are directly connected with it by its activities and living conditions. In this context the maximal attention should be paid to adaptation of the coastal industrial and social economic infrastructure to cyclic century fluctuations of the sea level in resonance with imposed on this process regular tide phenomena. It is necessary to understand these processes, as catastrophic, as well as their inevitability. Improvement of methods of the near-term term and short-term forecast on the one hand and development of engineering studies on flexible coastal infrastructure having ability of the adaptation (without radical reorganization) to consequences of level fluctuations accordingly is necessary. The perfection of engineering protective structures and ecologically social infrastructure ensuring favorable living conditions of the population is necessary. Positions of the given priority demand close cooperation of the relevant action centers in the Caspian littoral states. Priority actions for decision of the identified tasks within water area should be:
|
|
|
|
||
