OREANDA-NEWS. September 23, 2011. The Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources of Ukraine initiates introduction in Ukraine the new scale project – a system of space monitoring of the environmental situation. It was declared by the Minister of Environment and Natural Resources Mykola Zlochevsky at a briefing in the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine.

The space-based monitoring is used in the world developed countries. World leaders of this technology for today are Germany, the USA and France. In 2011, Ukraine will join them too. The tender for purchase of the corresponding equipment and the software will occur this autumn.
"By means of operational satellites the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources expects to raise efficiency of activity of the State Environmental Inspectorate. It is especially actual, considering reduction of the staff of the Inspectorate by 30 %," the Minister has underlined.

The space monitoring of woods will become the first stage in realization of this project. Mass illegal cutting down of trees in Ukraine is recently mainly not on suburbs of woods, and in their depth. Inspectors, as a rule, find out such cuttings down casually. The space monitoring will allow solving this problem. All spadework for project start will be finished till the end of the year. "The budgetary funds for this year already have been allocated - it is 50 mln. UAH. This is sufficient enough to provide a launch program," Mykola Zlochevsky has declared.

Also the Ministry of Natural Resources plans to introduce the monitoring from space behind a condition of the rivers and lakes, tracing a water level, erosion of coast and passage of an ice drift to the freshet period. In addition, the space monitoring can be used and in subsoil using. The snapshots from space may be made in different spectra, and on their basis it is possible to predict availability in the earth of minerals, including oil and gas.