China has made impressive commitment to monitoring the Songhua
River pollution in a regular and systematic way and to sharing
results and other information with neighboring Russia and the
United Nations Environment Program, a UNEP report said.
The report, released on Friday, also praised a recently
established joint monitoring program between China and Russia,
calling it "an encouraging step in further multilateral
co-operation on shared water resources."
UNEP said it was ready to assist Chinese authorities further in
relation to both the current spill and with measures to reduce the
risk of a similar incident in the future.
The report was completed by a four-person team of UNEP experts
who visited Northeast China last month to examine the November 13
blast at the Jilin Petrochemical Corporation and its polluting
effects on the Songhua River.
In its report, the team called for knowledge gained from the
incident to be incorporated into policy, legislation and
enforcement.
The Songhua River merges with the Heilong River and forms a
natural border with Russia, eventually flowing into the Sea of
Okhotsk.
China and UNEP "have agreed to share this report with the
relevant Russian authorities," the Kenyan-based agency said in a
news release.
The UNEP report described the chemical spill as "probably one of
the largest trans-boundary chemical spill incidents in a river
system in recent years."
It stressed that the accident has "major trans-boundary and
international significance" and suggested that both China and
Russia provide access for "independent and impartial" sampling and
chemical analysis of the spill.
But the UN report said that during the initial phase after the
explosion, the government's "communication and information sharing
with the general public was not adequate."
(China Daily January 14, 2006)
