Black Sea benefits as economies slip into the red

Owen Bowcott in Istanbul
Guardian

Tuesday March 28, 2000

The Black Sea, polluted for decades by fertilisers and pesticides, is beginning to stage a limited ecological recovery, surprising scientists by its resilience.

The improvements - solely due to the widespread economic depression in former communist states bordering the sea and along the Danube river - could, however, be rapidly reversed, an environmental conference in Istanbul heard yesterday.

Unless industrial and farming methods were transformed in the next five years, Professor Laurence Mee of Plymouth University warned the Black Sea Borders conference that an upturn in business would again trigger gigantic phytoplankton blooms which deprive plants of light and asphyxiate fish.

"There's a window of opportunity. The pressure is off for a while," said Professor Mee, a marine biologist who spent six years studying the sea's peculiar ecosystem.

"Fish stocks are increasing in some areas as the level of pollution declines in places. But there's a lack of sewage treatment and the evidence is that as economies recover they tend to go back to the same methods as before," he said.

Certain species, such as the monk seal, which was once common in the Black Sea, are said to have entirely disappeared from its waters.

The population of sturgeon, prized for its caviar, has declined dramatically - bottom-dwelling animals on which the fish graze were victims of the plankton blooms which cut out light to the sea floor.

Bottlenosed dolphins, once thought to number a million, have been reduced to no more than 300,000.

The Black Sea, landlocked apart from the narrow Bosphorus straits connecting it to the Mediterranean, has a unique ecology. Water below 150m contains vast quantities of dissolved hydrogen sulphide, the accumulation of thousands of years of decaying plants, and is devoid of marine life.

Only the top layers are fertile, particularly in the north-west, off the coast of Ukraine and Romania, where the sea is shallow.

It was the draining of marshes at the mouth of the Danube and intensive pig farming, introduced by President Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania, which resulted in thousands of tonnes of nitrogen and phosphorous fertilisers draining directly into the Black Sea from the 1960s onwards.

Those nutrients fed the phytoplankton blooms.

"Surprisingly the sea is getting better," Radu Minhea of the Black Sea environmental programme told the conference, convened in Istanbul by the British Council to bring together environmental activists from across the region.

"Economic decline has meant there's less industrial waste getting into the sea. People said it was dead, but the response has been quick."

Overfishing has also depleted the sea's stocks. Only anchovies have staged a significant recovery.

Pesticides - which can upset hormone balances, preventing breeding - may still be slowly poisoning larger mammals such as dolphins, warned Chloe Webster of the World Wide Fund for Nature.

The former Conservative environment minister, John Gummer, told the conference: "The pollution of the Black Sea is an international fact and affects us all.

"The Black Sea is part of the world's heritage."