Europe has succeeded in reducing toxic emissions that pollute the Arctic, but Asia is playing an increasing role in damaging the environmentally-sensitive region, the Arctic Council said in a study published on Thursday. Over the past 15 years, "the reduction of emissions in Europe has had a cleaning effect on the Arctic," the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) said in its report.
"A new threat against the Arctic regions is the increase of emissions from Asia and other warm regions," it said, noting that in particular Southeast Asia was "becoming an increasingly important source of soot to the Arctic atmosphere."
The study recalled however that Europe and Russia remain the biggest polluters of the Arctic.
AMAP was created in 1991 by the Arctic Council (Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States) to combat the deterioration of the region's environment.
The study said measurements taken in Alaska, in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard and in northwestern Russia showed that concentrations of sulphur dioxide emissions in the Arctic air have decreased significantly since the 1990s.
The positive results were largely due to significant reductions in emissions from non-ferrous metal smelters on Russia's Kola peninsula, where lakes close to the sources "are showing the clearest signs of recovery" in terms of acidity.
"Although they remain the dominant source of sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions within the Arctic, SO2 emissions from the smelters in Arctic Russia decreased by about 21 percent between 1992 and 2003," the report said.
The report warned countries in the Arctic region against a slowdown in their environmental efforts, noting that projections show that decreasing pollution trends observed between 1990 and 2000 "are likely to level off."
The Arctic Council is an intergovernmental forum for the countries in the region and its four million indigenous people.
Source: Agence France-Presse
