Chupa - step by step

Like other coastal com­munit­ies along the White Sea coast, the Chupa re­gion struggles with a series of en­vir­on­mental and de­vel­op­ment prob­lems. Local com­munit­ies in Rus­sia had been his­tor­ic­ally ali­en­ated by the cent­rally planned way of coastal re­source man­age­ment. Con­sequently, they re­gard reg­u­la­tions and lim­it­a­tions as ar­ti­fi­cial, im­posed from “out­side”, and there­fore not le­git­im­ate. Al­though de jure coastal re­sources might be a prop­erty of the state, they are de facto treated as com­mons. This fact has lead to a leg­acy to poach­ing, a prin­cipal threat for coastal man­age­ment and con­ser­va­tion in Rus­sia.

Two other threats com­mon along the White Sea are the neg­at­ive im­pact of un­reg­u­lated tour­ism and re­cre­ation, in­clud­ing “re­cre­ational” poach­ing and forest fires, and pos­sible de­vel­op­ment of en­vir­on­ment­ally un­friendly in­dus­tries, such as min­ing for gold, mus­cov­ite and plat­inum or oil ex­plor­a­tion. The only solu­tion is to make local com­munit­ies feel in charge of their re­sources, to make it their own in­terest to pre­vent poach­ing and other un­sus­tain­able prac­tices.

This de­vel­op­ment is un­for­tu­nately hampered by the un­der­devel­op­ment of a civil so­ci­ety, but can be pro­moted by cre­at­ing local in­terest groups, build­ing their ca­pa­city to sus­tain­ably man­age local re­sources, and im­prov­ing le­gis­la­tion by at­trib­ut­ing more rights to the local com­munit­ies and em­power­ing them eco­nom­ic­ally.

The idea of as­sist­ing local coastal com­munit­ies in find­ing sus­tain­able solu­tions to the man­age­ment of their re­sources has been jointly de­veloped by EUCC – The Coastal Union, WWF – Russia and the Biodiversity Conservation Center (BCC) in Mo­scow. Since the com­mit­ment of Rus­sia to the Earth Sum­mit in 1992 the three part­ners have been one of the few that are act­ive to se­cure sus­tain­able coastal man­age­ment in the coun­try.

EUCC has been sup­port­ing Local Agenda 21 activ­it­ies and has helped com­munit­ies in de­vel­op­ing their own coastal code of con­duct in the Len­in­grad Ob­last. WWF-Rus­si­a’s Mar­ine Pro­gram has ini­ti­ated some activ­it­ies along Rus­si­a’s Pa­cific Coast, in par­tic­u­lar plan­ning for mul­tiple use zones sur­round­ing the mar­ine/​coastal pro­tec­ted areas and BCC has been act­ive in pro­mot­ing in­teg­rated biod­iversity con­ser­va­tion along the coast.