A petition jointly organised by WWF-Russia and signed by more than 8,000 people was handed in to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin against the construction of a hydro-electric power station in Siberia that would threaten the indigenous population as well as the local ecosystem.
The construction project, in the Evenk municipal district, could drive as many as 2,000 Evenki out of their homes and deer-herding pasture lands and, according to the evaluation data, one million hectares of unique larch forest would be flooded.
These forests are almost unaffected by human agricultural activity and so are very important for biological diversity conservation and ecological balance maintenance, not only in Russia but for the whole planet. They play a crucial role in carbon balance maintenance and global climate change control.
The petition was handed in by WWF-Russia, Greenpeace-Russia, the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North as well as other non-governmental organisations. In 1988 the Soviet Union cancelled plans to construct a giant dam at the same site after Mikhail Gorbachev questioned the policy of building giant hydro-power stations.
“The building of the Turukhansk (now Evenk) Hydropower Station was rejected at the end of the 80s because of the results of serious environmental and economic examinations,” said Mikhail Kreindlin of Greenpeace-Russia. “The revival of this project will mean a return to the most dreadful times in the ex-USSR administrative command system.”
Such a large hydro-technical construction could cause irreversible changes to the environment of an area much greater than the construction zone itself. One of the three radioactive underground nuclear explosion areas in the flood plain of Tunguska would certainly be flooded as a result of the construction.
