A TV-and-radio marathon called "Save The Crabs" will take place today on the Kamchatka Peninsula.
More than 5,000 people have already signed an address to Russian leaders, the Troika media holding reports. That document calls on the Russian leadership to prevent the development of oil deposits on the Kamchatka shelf because king crabs and valuable fish species (salmon, in the first place) spawn there.
Talking to correspondents December 17, Robert Moiseyev, director of the Kamchatka ecology and nature-use institute (Far Eastern department of the Russian Academy of Sciences), noted that the Okhotsk Sea's ecosystem might well be disrupted, if the concerned companies start developing oil deposits on the local shelf.
Comprehensive environmental-economic expert checks must be conducted prior to oil-prospecting and oil-production operations; such expert checks will make it possible to assess possible consequences for the entire Okhotsk Sea area, the scientist believes.
In Moiseyev's words, the world now has not more than five natural habitats boasting sufficiently high biological-resource reproduction levels; for its own part, Russia has just one such habitat. The number of such areas has diminished threefold all over the world in the past 50 years.
Neither the public at large, nor Kamchatka environmentalists have discussed oil-prospecting and oil-production operations on the local shelf, the institute's director stressed.
The Rosneft oil company has the right to develop the Veninsky deposit in line with the Sakhalin-3 project, as well as a West Kamchatka shelf sector. Shelf resources are estimated at 900 million tons of fuel equivalent, the corporate web site says.
