Black Sea residents want to aid marine recovery

OSLO, Aug 15 (Reuters) People living around the Black Sea seem willing to pay more to help the sea recover from near-collapse after decades of pollution and overfishing, a UN-sponsored survey showed.

The Black Sea Ecosystem Recovery Project said it would put the findings -- based on 400 interviews with residents around the Black Sea in Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey and Georgia -- to governments in the region to encourage action.

''Almost 80 per cent of respondents said they would be ...

prepared to pay extra money towards improving the Black Sea environment,'' it said in a statement. The project was funded by the UN's Global Environment Facility lending group.

It also said that almost 40 per cent of those questioned reckoned that lack of government action was the main barrier to cleaning up the Black Sea, where 21 of 26 major fish species have been considered commercially extinct since the 1990s.

The Black Sea faces threats including pollution from factories, overfishing and coastal development even though it has recovered slightly since a near ecological collapse in the 1990s.

Ivan Zavadsky, director of the UN's Danube/Black Sea Programme, said that poor farming practices were the main threat with thousands of tonnes of nitrogen and phosphorous fertilisers running into the sea every year and choking marine life.

And he said that the partial environmental recovery in the past decade was largely because the economic downturn after the collapse of the Soviet Union had cut fertiliser use.

''Economic collapse and good luck does not provide a good strategy for managing the Black Sea environment,'' he said in a statement.

Steve Menzies of the Black Sea Ecosystem Recovery Project said the small sample of just 400 people meant big margins of error. ''Our goal was to get an idea of people's attitudes and to raise awareness of the state of the Black Sea,'' he said.

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