On the border of the Rivne Nature Reserve, it is planned to start mining amber in the area of the largest swampy massifs of Ukraine, Syraya Purgiya.
A special mining permit on an area of 562.8 hectares was sold in the Prozorro.Sales system in March 2023, the Ukrainian Environmental Group reports on Facebook.
It is noted that the industrial extraction of amber requires large-scale drainage and removal of the top layer of soil over a large area. This will destroy the swamp ecosystem.
Eco-activists stressed that the auction was made possible thanks to the position of the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources, which on November 15, 2022 agreed to put the site up for auction.
"The law allows the ministry to establish the conditions for granting subsoil for use, but its specialists have reduced their role only to checking the entry of the site into the limits of the natural reserve fund," the report says.
The authors emphasized that the Ministry of Natural Resources approved a petition two years ago to expand the Rivne Nature Reserve to the territory where they now plan to mine amber. The Agency has reliable information about the presence of Red Book species and environments protected by the Berne Convention on the site. Mining amber will destroy rare nature.
They added that this is not the first time. In the same swamp, but further from the reserve, another plot of 516.43 hectares was sold.
To protect nature, eco-activists propose to the Ministry of Natural Resources:
- recognize mining activities as inadmissible during the environmental impact assessment procedure;
- reconsider the approach to coordinating mining operations in areas with high levels of biodiversity;
- to make the procedure for issuing permits for the extraction of minerals more environmentally friendly, namely, to prohibit mining in areas that are promising for the reserve and preserved in a natural state.
As EcoPolitic reported earlier, in the Kyiv region in the Vasylkivska community, they want to build an asphalt plant near the newly created nature reserve Fairy Yar. However, the most popular and picturesque part of the "Hunting Grounds" ravine, which was called "Fairy Yar" in social networks, was not included in the conservation zone and may become a sanitary zone of the new enterprise.
