Text 8. To save dnipro

Volodymyr Maximchuk, Deputy Head of the Committee for the Dnipro and Small Rivers Protection of Ukraine, thinks that the salvation of the Dnipro is one of the main ecological problems of Ukraine.

«The Committee for the Dnipro Protection appeared on the wave of the all-Ukrainian concern and discontent with the state of water objects: rivers, marshes, water pools and especially with the terrific, ecologically unjustified projects as the Dnipro-Bug estuary damming and the throwing of the Danube water into the Dnipro.

There are some directions for work of the Committee now. One of them is ecological education. To know how to save water, one should, of course, get an idea of what the water is, how it lives, which cycles it has, what one has to do to preserve our waters.

Another direction is local ecological examinations. Our experts visit different regions by request of the environment protection organizations or even individuals, and help them to clear up one or another problem, advice on how to act in a way that cannot bring any harm to the environment because of the decisions of local authorities.

We try to cooperate with scientific organizations of Kyiv and Ukraine. Though our attempts are not always successful, because these organizations support state programmes which our NGO often disagree with. They want to leave Dnipro as it is, that means to leave six, saying without exaggeration, foul artificial seas hoping that stopping the flow of dirty effluent will recover the river. One should not forget that the reservoirs were made to the idea to change the nature, based on the principle that people shall conquer the nature. We came to the conclusion that there is no need in the majority of these reservoirs. There is another matter – we have to renew the self-purification abilities of Dnipro. To regulate the flow we need only one Kremenchuk reservoir, and as a point of water extraction the Kakhovka reservoir is needed. It is necessary to free Dnipro from the burden of other artificial seas. We keep talking about this matter. When the level of the Kaniv reservoir is lowered even half a meter, the river will be free till Trypillya, which means that Kyiv’s suburban recreation zone will be free too. This will be freely flowing river without radioactive silt. The meadows giving lots of hay will be renewed, a lot of land can he used for livestock farming, gardening etc. Using sensitive model to study the problems, where ecological, social and economic problems are interweaved, we concluded that one meter lowering of the water level of the reservoir will favourably effect health of Kyiv inhabitants. Now the lethality rate in Kyiv is higher that birth rate. The improvement of the environment state can change the situation».

Text 9. The north pole is melting away!

New research predicts that the polar icecap which exists all year round will disappear entirely in the next century due to global warming.

New measurements taken on the first ever sea voyage across the pole indicate that the temperature of the water 200 m below the ice has increased by 1 degree Celsius in the last few years. Computer modelling indicates that the temperature could eventually rise by more than 6 degrees over the next century – faster than anywhere else on Earth.

Other research shows that water flowing up the Norwegian coast into the Arctic has also recently grown warmer. The number of icebergs moving in the other direction down from the Arctic has, however, gone down by nearly 40 percent.

These changes in the Arctic could signal a major shift in the world’s ocean currents which could have potentially catastrophic effects, as these currents play a large part in determining local climates. The world’s climate won't change smoothly, but in sudden jumps, with huge regional differences.

It is predicted that places where it is already hot and dry will warm even more, while due to the changing ocean currents, cooling will occur where we might like some warmth, such as here, in Northern Europe.

There have recently been major disruptions of the currents in the North Atlantic. They were caused by the failure of the «Odden Feature», where water is sucked down from the surface to the seabed which feeds the deep currents which link all of the world’s oceans. This threatens to affect the Gulf Stream which warms the coast of Western Europe and keeps temperatures in Scotland above those in Nova Scotia in Canada.