"Since 2004, following the signing of a tripartite agreement between Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, practical movement in exploring issues of the status of the Caspian Sea has not moved even a bit, although in 2004 we produced 60% of the text part, except for serious divisions that were on the southern part," the ex-Minister of Fuel and Energy Viktor Kalyuzhny said. "Today, the Caspian Sea is not only an energy problem, but also a geopolitical problem. If earlier in the Caspian Sea there had been the Caspian Flotilla, today almost all states have some sort of a frontier troops and border fleet. I have always supported demilitarization and said that it is necessary to conclude a general agreement on the safety of these five states for the Caspian Flotilla to exercise general control and address common security issues. The first step was taken after signing the Russian-Kazakh agreement on the delimitation of the northern part of the Caspian Sea in 1998, which gives the right to the development of oil fields.
In 1975, the area in which our neighbors, the Kazakhs, primarily work,was a protected area for sturgeon fishing, and oil development was banned, although it was known already in Soviet times that the productive Kashagan field was there.
The topic of the Kazakhs working in Kashagan has become a serious danger for the environment of the Caspian Sea, given that Kashagan is hydrogen sulphide field (oil, of course, is bad for water resources, but it can be collected, some of it settles, some of it will be consumed by fish). The problem with hydrogen sulphide is that everything will be killed. There were examples of this. For instance, swans and seals died in the Mangyshlak area. This problem is very serious. Although there was the Tehran Framework Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Caspian Sea in 2003 and its Protocol of 2011, which address oil pollution in this respect, there are many nuances to add."
"Environmental problems can only be solved by legal means," the executive director of the Institute of Environmental Law problems "Ecojuris", Vitaly Gorokhov, believes. "We need rallies, television coverage needs, newspaper articles, but to really solve any problem, we need legal methods. Unfortunately, in Russia the three components of the legal framework are not yet at the highest level. Firstly, the legal framework. It is far from perfect, far from complete, we still have many environmental holes. Secondly, there is law enforcement. Many structures, starting from the Russian government, are not implementing the laws that already exist. Thirdly there is legal literacy. As a result, ordinary people suffer, including those living around the Caspian Sea. If they knew their environmental rights, they could havee protected them. As for the purely environmental problems of the Caspian region, they have long been known. Around Baku the sea is barely alive. You go swimming in the sea and when you come out your feet stick to the sand because there is a layer of oil on the bottom. The light fraction evaporates, and the heavy fraction falls to the bottom and keeps poisoning the environment and biological resources for years. To avoid this, we suggest that Russia should adopt a law on the protection of the seas from oil pollution. It should be a compilation of a U.S. law passed in 1990, which spelled out in detail the requirements for tankers and the oil companies. We now managed to adopt that law sufficiently highly. Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev, when he was president, twice drew attention to the fact that such a law is needed, and instructed the government and the Duma to develop it. The same Medvedev when he was president at a meeting of the G20 said that this will not be enough. If there is no law in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, any emergency in one country can affect the others. Therefore, Medvedev called for adopting these laws internationally. There are conventions, but they aren't enough to prevent undesirable events and, if they occur, to get money to eliminate them.
"After the Gulf of Mexico, everyone had a shock," member of the advisory board of the Fund for Protection of the Caspian Sea (Kazakhstan) Serikzhan Mambetalin says. "Everyone knew that there had been a great tragedy. Kazakhs as nomads know how to read the signs. It was a sign from above, because with the level of oil production in the Caspian Sea that the consortium of "Kashagan" plans to achieve - it is 50 million tons per year - biodiversity will be out of the question. Sturgeon (90% of the world's sturgeon are found in the Caspian Sea) and oil are two completely incompatible concepts. Especially when the oil industry works according to the standards that were set in the early days of our independence, that is, when Russia and Kazakhstan wanted to attract investment and the level of environmental legislation has been reduced.
A paradoxical situation: multinational companies that operate, for example, here in Kazakhstan, follow local laws, but if you look at international practice, it is very often a violation of international law. Therefore, one of the main tasks of the fund is to adjust the level of the law of the Caspian countries to international level. Another challenge is to coordinate the efforts of the small NGOs working in the Caspian countries and help them in their work. The GreenPeace Energy Program works in the Arctic, the WWF - in Sakhalin, in the Far East. The Caspian has no large funds, no large NGOs that could coordinate the work. Our task is to bring in the expert advice fund of top ecologists, the best specialists, to get scientists involved in this problem and make suggestions to the relevant authorities, their governments."
"Azerbaijan has unilaterally renounced catching beluga," a journalist of "Azerbaijani news" Galia Aliyeva says. "Sturgeon is caught only for scientific research. One can speak a lot about the project to clean the coastal zone, the aeration of the water that flows down - we have built the Hovsan aeration station that can clean up to 60% of the contaminated water, so the water that goes into the sea is purified. Oil companies have been able to approach the principle of "zero discharge". Petropollution on the Azerbaijan shelf is particularly noticeable. We have a state agency in Baku aimed at eliminating oil contamination, and one of the principles of the state agency is that ships entering Baku bay should stop at a certain distance, get cleaned and only after that enter Baku Bay. People work for us, and the state is working, and the Ministry of the Environment."
"I have been many times in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, the sea is dirty, it is impossible to swim. You get out all sticky," artist Nikas Safronov complains. "In general, very few people are bathing, they would rather go to Dubai or the Maldives instead. I am from the Volga, I was born in Ulyanovsk and was in the Volga delta. There you could still swim. But no further. It is a reservoir of discharge. We are losing the Caspian Sea. This is a big problem for the world, because the Caspian Sea, like Lake Baikal, which I am also trying to protect, belongs to the world. I will do everything in my power. You need to tell the public that the Caspian Sea is the problem of the entire world and not only of Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. This is a problem of the entire world. "
