The international seminar "Accidental transboundary water pollution prevention – contingency planning, early warning, mitigation" is co-organized by Hungary and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), under the auspices of the Joint Expert Group on Water and Industrial Accidents (JEG) and International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River (ICPDR). Leading experts from Hungary, Germany, Austria, the Republic of Moldova, Romania, the Czech Republic, Serbia, Latvia and Armenia participated in the event.

 

The seminar was attended also by the Ukrainian expert - Iryna Nikolaieva, OSCE consultant and the head of Ecoplatform. She told international colleagues about regional and transboundary threats of TMFs operation in our country, in particular about currently investigated facilities in the transboundary Dniester river basin and in the Seversky Donets river sub-basin in Donbas.

 

The issue of transboundary cooperation was of special attention. Irina shared with experts the experience of such cooperation in the Dniester River basin. Thus, the representatives of Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova bilaterally address the operation issues of Oriana TMFs (Ivano-Frankivsk region) and of Moldavian TPP (Odessa region). This year, experts from these countries jointly visited the facilities and are preparing materials for consideration at the Dniester Commission meeting. This is a body of interstate cooperation between the two countries in the field of protection, sustainable use and development of the Dniester River basin.

 

Despite the fact that TMFs were designed and built for the safe industrial waste storage, in practice, under the operating failures, such facilities are the sources of accidental water pollution. Therefore, the issue of preventing transboundary accidental pollution of river basins from such potentially hazard objects shall be considered at the interstate level.

The main conclusion is that our country is definitely on the right track identifying and researching the environmental threats to the water bodies posed by such hazard objects as TMFs. But there is still a lot of work ahead on accidental transboundary water pollution prevention. The next highly important step should be the establishment of an early warning system set up between Ukraine and neighbouring countries for transboundary rivers.