Russia to establish natural park in Baltic borderlands
Russian Minister of Natural Resources Yury Trutnev in last week’s meeting in the Baltic Marine Environmental Commission confirmed that a new national park is to be established along the border to Finland.
The Ingrian Natural Park will include almost 18,000 hectares of land covering nine islands or island groups at the eastern end of the Gulf of Finland, Rosbalt.ru reports. The park will be established by the end of 2009, Mr. Trutnev told the members of the Baltic Marine Environmental Commission (HELCOM) in a meeting in Helsinki last week. He added that the park will be established together with funding agencies from the neighboring countries.
-The Russian decision to set up the nature park is a very important one, Ilkka Heikkinen from the Finnish Ministry of the Environment says to Helsingin Sanomat.
Cooperation in nature conservation between Russia and Finland is moving forward in other ways as well. Heikkinen says that preparations for a letter of intent for a green zone of Fennoscandia have proceeded in a positive spirit and that this will be a string of pearls of conservation areas extending from the Barents Sea to the Gulf of Finland, the newspaper writes.
Read more about the meeting in HELCOM on the organisation website
