29 and counting

And Caspian sturgeon better protected The prospects of protecting the Caspian Sea’s endangered sturgeon populations have improved since GRID-Arendal contributed to putting environmental crime on the international agenda a few years ago. To raise awareness and spur action, our Environmental Crime unit organised a tour of journalists to the Caspian and produced a report on sturgeon poaching in Russia called Losing the Tsar-Fish.

That was in 2015. Since that time, the report helped influence the Russian government to hold parliamentary hearings at the High Environmental Council of the State Duma on the need to strengthen environmental control and ensure that populations of sturgeon, which are poached for their caviar, are preserved and restored. GRID-Arendal helped the council make a series of recommendations to curb illegal activities.

Following up on these recommendations, the Federal Agency for Fisheries (Rosrybolovsvo) discussed including some sturgeon species in the Red Data Book of the Russian Federation which documents threats to biodiversity. It also looked at creating a database of genetic materials for sturgeon and a study of Siberian sturgeon in the Kolyma river basin. Finally, it reviewed the status of sturgeon stocks in the Siberian region and the Azov- Black Sea basins and identified both as “critical”.

IMPACT

The impact of this project was recently confirmed by changes to sections of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, Article 258-1: Illegal hunting. “lllegal extraction and trafficking of especially valuable wild animals and aquatic biological resources belonging to species listed in the Red Data Book of the Russian Federation and (or) protected by international treaties of the Russian Federation…. The changes became law in 2018 and provide severe penalties for organised poaching, a major element of environmental crime in the region: The criminal acts… committed by an organised group, are punished by imprisonment for a term of six to nine years with a fine in the amount of one million five hundred thousand to three million rubles…. These changes are aimed at increasing penalties for illegal activities related to poaching and are expected to curb its negative impact.

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