DENISOV V.V. Murmansk Marine Biological Institute RAS

Exploration of the marine oil gas Arctic resources is a scaled long-term project.

Since the middle 80-ies of the XX century there takes place a consequential, sometimes contradictory advancing of Ministries and oil-gas companies from reconnaissance to the exploitation of oil-gas reserves on the Barents-Kara Seas shelf.

This process started during the soviet period and goes on in the complicated difficult conditions of the new Russia political-economical reality and status formation in the world. Scale of the task conditions the necessity of its solving in general frames of strategic planning of economic development.

At the moment there exist several similar documents, among which the following: «Marine doctrine of the Russian Federation for the period till the year 2020». «Energy power strategy of Russia for the period till the year 2020», «State Program of the complex exploration of the North-West region of Russia», «Strategy of the Arctic shelf oil-gas resources exploration» (several ministry variants starting since the middle 90-ies), «Strategy of the Murmansk region economic development till the year 2015» are to be considered the most important.

All the enumerated documents underline not only strategic importance of oil- gas shelf resources for the Russia economy, but also assign with a different degree of elaboration quantitative parameters and geography of hydrocarbons excavation and the stages for realization of these plans, hi spite of the appearing during shelf recourses exploration correction of strategy parameters, their major contents remains unchangeable - extensive putting into exploitation during the nearest 15-20 years of a great number of large fields in the Barents, Pechora and Kara Seas. To the realization of these projects there should be added excelling development of system of marine oil transportation entering for export from other regions of the country (development of the Murmansk transportation junction), to estimate complexity of the forming situation.

In accordance with the legislation in force (Law of RF «On the ecological expertise») all the materials of strategic development (programs, projects of development schemes, long-term plans etc.) are to be accompanied by ecological estimation obtaining of the supposed activity consequences. Analogous practice exists in the majority countries of the world and is called «ecological estimation of the consequences of strategic decisions» or shortly, SEE (strategic ecological estimation).

EIA procedure of project decisions and SEE constitute two branches of the unified procedure to account ecological requirements when the man intrudes into the environment. Owing to the system difficulties practical realization of SEE as «working» procedure leaves behind the usual EIA practice by 15-20 years. This presentation is devoted to the discussion of some SEE problems as applied to the Arctic shelf exploration.

From the ecological geography of the sea position (or marine geoecology) SEE differs from EIA of project decisions by several principal features, exactly:

? significantly larger spatial-temporal scales to realize the pointed out activity;
? vagueness in the development of natural and social- economic processes during realization of the pointed out activity;
? necessity to account cumulative (integrated) impacts from the large number of spatially distributed but of similar type oil-gas excavation infra-structure objects or/and objects and forms of activity (military, fishery etc.)
? complexity to reveal institutional and juridical status of the initiator of commercial activity (who has to carry out SEE);
? international transboundary aspects of environmental protection in the long- term aspect.

Let us discuss these peculiarities in more details.

Firstly, scale of such activity like for instance, exploration of the Barents-Kara oil- gas bearing province, demands systematic understanding of the natural processes which will occur on the area exceeding 1 mill km" and in the temporal perspective of at least first tens of years. Expert-ecologists should bear in mind that in SEE even the description of a current state of environment and society (baseline study) is not a