As the flood of city dwellers seeking respite in the countryside at the weekend would seem to testify, air quality in major centers such as Moscow, St. Petersburg and Nizhny Novogorod remains a huge problem, which has not been helped by the increasing number of cars on the roads.
Alexander Bedritsky, the head of the Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring, told an environmental conference that Russia should adopt strict European emission requirements.
"For the level of air pollution to stop rising, engine production standards should be toughened to meet the Euro-2 and Euro-3 environmental standards," he said.
Bedritsky also suggested that new roads and interchanges should be built to ease congestion and cars should gradually switch to using gas as fuel instead of gasoline.
"Unfortunately, the level of air pollution in Russia's big cities is not falling, [and] the trend has not become positive," he said, adding that increased industrial production was also not helping to maintain a fall in pollution levels that had been registered in the 1990s.
