Green obsession

In Moscow they are going to count all the trees, meadows and parks

The Moscow authorities have decided to more rationally distribute budget funds for landscaping the city, for which they first intend to count all perennial plants. Yesterday, the metropolitan government approved a project proposed by the city Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Protection to improve the procedure for inventorying green areas. This document, according to the head of the department Leonid Bochin, should give impetus to the program to re-register all green spaces in the city, which has been stalled for more than six years, and protect the latter from the ubiquitous construction complex.

According to the first deputy head of the department of natural resources management and environmental protection of the capital, Natalia Brinza, the decision on the need to count almost every bush of greenery in the metropolis was made back in 2001. However, during this time, only about 63% of the green zones of the so-called 1st and 2nd categories, that is, especially valuable areas of the natural complex, have been inventoried. However, inventory often did not prevent builders from cutting down trees that were in the way. “The courtyard and industrial areas were completely ignored,” noted the head of the department of housing, communal services and city improvement, Artur Keskinov.

Ms. Brinza believes that, in fact, green areas need to be inventoried anew. “Currently, the register data is updated once every five years,” she said, “and it is necessary to enter information promptly so that all changes are taken into account in the register in a timely manner.” This, according to her, will make it possible to more clearly plan further landscaping, to specifically select so-called areas of compensatory landscaping, which today do not solve the problem of cutting down public gardens for construction sites. In addition, officials from the environmental department are confident that the “freedom-free” list of Moscow trees will force prefectures to spend budget funds on landscaping more rationally. As Mr. Keskinov told Vremya Novostey, Moscow is now spending up to 4 billion rubles. to support the “lungs of the city.”

According to Moscow deputies, the procedure for decorating the city with living greenery is unlikely to become less expensive. But, as Mikhail Moskvin-Tarkhanov, Chairman of the Commission for Perspective Development and Urban Planning of the Moscow City Duma, said in an interview with a Vremya Novostey correspondent, clear boundaries of natural zones will help avoid “spontaneous waste of funds on landscaping in manual control mode.” “As long as the green complex of the city, which makes up 30%, has no boundaries, you can do whatever you want with it, otherwise it will be inviolable,” the deputy is sure.

It is noteworthy that the prefects of the city districts, having agreed with the need for such a “one-time difficult step,” immediately recalled that the inventory could lead to an even greater shortage of available space. And, to prevent this from happening, some of them proposed to simultaneously reduce the so-called sanitary protection zones of industrial enterprises. “This is a huge reserve,” said Vladimir Zotov, prefect of the South-Eastern Administrative District. “We have 64 enterprises on the territory of 1,410 hectares of sanitary protection zones.” According to Mr. Zotov, most of these businesses are no longer operating at full capacity, and therefore the district does not need as much compensation. However, industrialists do not want to revise the boundaries of green zones. The authorities are going to spur them on by increasing the rent for land, which will also include some compensation for these green areas that are unattainable for the capital’s builders.

Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov found this way out of the unusually constrained position of the construction industry within the framework of city moratoriums on infill development and adjustment of the boundaries of natural areas quite acceptable. “Landowners should be worried when it comes to an enterprise with a sanitary protection zone,” he gave an informal instruction to the head of the complex of property and land relations, Vladimir Silkin. “And enterprises must pay.” The new system of operational inventory of Moscow's green areas also seemed quite acceptable to the mayor. “Inventory and maintenance of a unified register of green spaces is a very useful matter,” Mr. Luzhkov concluded. The main thing, the mayor believes, is not to go to extremes. “I can’t imagine how we will take inventory on Elk Island and hang tags on every tree. In the Alexander Garden, all trees must be inventoried, and, for example, in Izmailovsky Park there must be different accounting principles. There must be boundaries where trees grow, where there are other areas of landscaping - meadows, spaces free of trees. And this will be subject to protection from cutting down and damage,” said the mayor of Moscow.

The recalculation of Moscow's greenery, as the capital's environmentalists have determined, will take at least another three years.

Yulia KHOMCHENKO