A memorandum of cooperation was signed with the local NGO “Ekoclub”, which will install nine public monitoring stations in Rivne and Ostroh, as well as in the village of Horodok.
Rivne is a region in Western Ukraine which is not industrial, but there are extremely environmentally harmful enterprises and the air is intensively polluted by transport. The hostilities have brought additional pollution and risks to people’s safety for the city of Rivne and all regions: rockets are flying here, causing fires in industrial premises and oil depots. There are two nuclear power plants nearby. Therefore, the NGO “Ekoclub” has initiated the development of a public air monitoring station network in the Rivne region to monitor the safety of the environment.
“Reports on the environmental state in the Rivne region show a stable increase in the level of pollutants: for example, during 2021, formaldehyde levels in Rivne were exceeded by two to four times. It is important to have truly operational monitoring since municipal posts do not allow us to monitor the state of pollution at the current time. In the village of Horodok, which is the largest industrial polluter in the region, the “Azot” ammonia fertilizer plant and the “Kronospan” woodworking plant, which has already started working, no air monitoring was carried out until recently,” says Nataliya Kholodova, a campaigner from the NGO “Ekoclub”.
The international project “Clean Air for Ukraine”, implemented by the NGO “Arnika” (Prague, Czech Republic) with the financial support of the Transition Program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic and the National Endowment for Democracy (USA), provides the Rivne region with nine air quality monitoring stations of the European Ecocity model, which are made in Ukraine.
So far, only three air quality monitoring posts have been installed by the government in Rivne. The degree of air pollution in the city is determined by the Regional Centre for Hydrometeorology, whose employees take samples manually, and the results are reported once a month. The Department of Ecology and Natural Resources of the Rivne Region publishes data on pollution even less often: only once every four months.
“We are glad that the Rivne region is joining the European environmental safety systems. EcoCity is the largest and most modern air quality monitoring network in Ukraine. The stations that were installed in Rivne and local areas will analyse the air quality according to 19 indicators of air pollution. The information will be available to everyone on the electronic map https://eco-city.org.ua/,” said Oleksiy Trelevskyi, head of the public organization “Free Arduino” and curator of the Ukrainian network of public air quality monitoring EcoCity.
Thanks to the new monitoring posts, people will be able to receive information about air pollution caused by various substances and about the level of radiation at any time online, without application to the authorities, independently.
For more information:
Julia Huziy, “Ecoclub”, Telegram/Tel.: +380687589889, julia@ecoclubrivne.org
Tetiana Zhavzharova, “Clean air for Ukraine”, Telegram/Viber/Tel.: 099 756-18-95 tetiana.zhavzharova@arnika.org
