VILNIUS - The UNESCO World Heritage Committee announced that it planned to list Lithuania's Curonian Spit as endangered on Feb. 1 next year if Lithuania and Russia failed to sign an agreement on the independent evaluation of environmental effects, accident prevention and the elimination of consequences of oil drilling at the D-6 deposit.
The World Heritage Committee passed a decision in China earlier this week that expressed deep concern over the planned oil drilling at Russia's D-6 extraction site, located just 23 kilometers from the Curonian Spit, without a joint Lithuanian-Russian environmental study.
Initiated by Lithuania, the decision considers the possible ecological threats of drilling so close to the picturesque area of the spit, the Foreign Ministry said on July 8.
However, Russia, which is also a member of the Convention on World Heritage, ignored the committee's earlier decisions on common actions - an evaluation of the oil deposit's environmental effects, environmental monitoring, preparation plans of prevention and elimination measures - thus violating Article 6.3 of the document.
According to a press release, this article states that members may take no actions that could directly or indirectly harm cultural or natural heritage sites located in the territory of another convention member.
Lithuania, just as Russia, is a member of the World Heritage Committee and was elected to a four-year tenure at the UNESCO's general conference in 2003.
In 2000, Lithuania and Russia included the Curonian Spit - a unique land formation including pine forests and sand dunes - in the UNESCO List of Cultural Heritage.
Meanwhile, a subsidiary of Russia's oil company Lukoil, Lukoil-Kaliningradmorneft, is currently continuing work at D-6 in the Baltic Sea in the region of Kaliningrad. In spite of protests on various levels, Lukoil has began drilling at the site.
According to preliminary data, about 600,000 tons of crude will be extracted at the oil deposit annually.
D-6, also known as Kravcovskoye, was tracked in 1983 and is the largest oil deposit on the sea shelf close to the Kaliningrad region. The deposit is just 23 kilometers from the Curonian Spit and five kilometers from the maritime Lithuanian border.
In the beginning of November, UNESCO experts declared D-6 as an ecological threat to the Curonian Spit National Park.
