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12/20/12

The Arctic Energy and Mineral Resources: Scramble for the Arctic to Dominate Environmental Agenda - by Roland Oliphant

2012 saw the climate-change-fueled dash for the Arctic's riches dominate the environmental agenda.

The debate over the high north, the annual nightmare of forest fires and continuing battles between activists and developers over roads, mines and the Sochi Olympics are only likely to intensify next year.

Greenpeace activists stormed Gazprom's Prirazlomnaya oil rig in the Pechora Sea in the first of what will likely be many confrontations over the development of oil and gas on the Arctic shelf.

In less remote locales, the long battle over the Khimki forest dragged into a sixth year, with activists persuading the European Parliament to hold hearings on Vinci's involvement and President Vladimir Putin revealing at his end-of-the-year news conference that the French construction company at one point had threatened to quit the project altogether.

New fights broke out across the country over construction projects. Plans to mine nickel deposits in the Voronezh region brought together an unlikely alliance of environmentalists, local residents and Cossacks.

Meanwhile, a vocal campaign by environmentalists and ecotourism entrepreneurs forced the Natural Resources and Environment Ministry to call an emergency summit over a road across a planned national park in the Khibiny Mountains in the Murmansk region.

Campaigners continued to face harassment. Suren Gazaryan, of the North Caucasus Environmental Watch, will  battle charges of threatening to kill a security guard at the gargantuan neoclassical construction on the Black Sea coast that whistle-blower Sergei Kolesnikov called "Putin's palace."

Read more: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/special/environment/eng/scramble-for-the-arctic-to-dominate-environmental-agenda.html#ixzz2FcTe6gVF

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