Spotlight: Pollution in Eastern Europe

▪ 1996

 In 1995 Eastern Europe pondered ways to clean itself up. Well it might, since it is arguably the most polluted region on Earth. (See Map—>.) From Poland to Romania and from the Czech Republic to Moldova, its skies are dirty, its rivers and lakes contaminated, and its soils so poisoned that in some places the crops are inedible. Shortly before the Soviet Union's demise in 1991, the Kremlin admitted that 3.5 million sq km (1.35 million sq mi), 16% of the nation's territory, were so polluted as to be a risk to human health. They were a risk to political health as well; some of the 45 million people who were worst affected joined other protesters in making environmental degradation a catalyst for ending communist mismanagement.

      Poland serves well as an example of how bad things can get. The Polish Academy of Sciences has described the country as the most polluted in the world. Few of its coal-burning industrial facilities and power plants have effective pollution-control systems, yet coal is crucial since it supplies about 80% of the country's energy. Air pollution in nearly every major city is 50 times the legal limit; it also has reduced yields of barley, beans, and potatoes by 10-55%.

      About half of Poland's cities have no wastewater-treatment systems. Even in Warsaw only half of the sewage is treated, the rest being dumped raw into the Vistula River, which carries it to the Baltic Sea. Water along most of the lengths of the country's monitored rivers is too polluted to drink even after disinfection. A fourth of the country's soil is believed to be so contaminated that it cannot grow food that is safe for people or livestock, and in the Katowice region 90% of fruit and vegetables are thought to be toxic to humans.

      Fortunately, Poland is now working to reduce pollution. In 1992 the government shut down 18 of the dirtiest industrial plants. In 1995 it tried—with only moderate success—to implement the antipollution standards laid down in the comprehensive National Environmental Policy of 1990, the first such plan in Eastern Europe.

      Other countries of the region face similar problems. In the former East Germany, average levels of sulfur dioxide and particulates are many times those found in the U.S. The town of Boxberg, with its lignite-burning power plant, emits more sulfur dioxide annually than the total emissions of Denmark and Norway combined. Acid rain has damaged 35% of Hungary's forests, 50% of the former East Germany's, 73% of the former Czechoslovakia's, 78% of Bulgaria's, and 82% of Poland's. A third of the rivers in the Czech Republic and half of those in Slovakia no longer support aquatic life. As much as 80% of Romania's river water is unfit for drinking. The Black Sea receives so much chemical pollution, large amounts of it via the Danube and Dnieper rivers, that 90% of the sea is biologically dead.

      All this environmental damage levies sizable economic costs. In the Czech Republic and Slovakia, annual crop losses from sulfur dioxide alone cost the economy almost $200 million. In the Czech Republic, air pollution of all kinds accounts for losses totaling the equivalent of 1.3 million metric tons of wheat, or about 125 kg (275 lb) per person—half of a Czech citizen's grain needs for a year.

      Then there are health costs. In the dirtiest parts of Eastern Europe, life expectancy is several years lower than in cleaner areas, and the incidence of cancer, reproductive problems, and other ailments is far higher. In Hungary one in 17 deaths is thought to be due to pollution. Lack of environmental safeguards and poor health care have combined to reduce the average life expectancy in the former Soviet Union to less than 64 years. In several high-pollution areas of western Russia, 10-20% of children are born with environmentally related birth defects.

      The worst environmental debacle centres on the Chernobyl nuclear power station accident in the Soviet Union in 1986. The explosions and fire, which produced more fallout than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, and irradiated an area of 200,000 sq km (77,000 sq mi), caused the evacuation of a quarter of a million people in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. Belarusian officials believe that as much as one-fifth of their country's farmlands has been rendered unusable by Chernobyl radiation, and it is expected that more than two million people eventually will be moved from contaminated areas. Another 16 Chernobyl-type power stations exist in western Russia and Eastern Europe, some of them notoriously unsafe.

      Amid the gloom there nonetheless are rays of hope. Eastern Europeans are realizing that environmental degradation accounts for losses of 5-10% in their countries' gross national products. They are outraged and are saying so. A poll in Russia found that almost one in two citizens considers pollution to be the nation's most urgent problem, ahead of housing shortages and poor medical services. In the former Czechoslovakia four people out of five believe the top priority should be environmental rehabilitation. The Romanian Ecological Movement has 112 local groups and more than 100,000 members, plus a good number of small "green" organizations. These are encouraging signs, but it remains to be seen whether Eastern Europe's newfound environmental awareness can be exercised in time to reverse the decades of gross neglect.

      Norman Myers is a consultant scientist in environment and development, a visiting fellow of Green College, Oxford, and a senior fellow of the World Wildlife Fund.

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