Ecosystem and human health assessment to define environmental management strategies: the case of long-term human impacts on an Arctic lake / Moiseenko T. I., Gashkina N. A., Voinov A. A. [et al.] // The Science of the Total Environment. - 2006. - Т. 369, № 1-3. - С. 1-20.

18 T.I. Moiseenko et al. /Science o f the Total Environment 369 (2006) 1-20 to communicate the information about ecosystem and human health back into the economic and social systems, which could help design adequate control and manage­ ment practices (the feed-back chain in Fig. 9b ). At first glance this may seem simple, and one could assume that once the maximal loads for heavy metals and nutrients are identified, the appropriate regulatory and institutional mechanisms will follow. However, this is not a straightforward process in the West (Voinov et al., 2004a) , and it is way more difficult to implement in conditions of the transitional economy in Russia. The Lake Imandra watershed is somewhat unusual for the Arctic for an extremely high permanent population. The strategies for the development of the North adopted in the USSR, especially in the 1920s-50s have been primarily based on permanent settlements providing the entire infrastructure necessary to support livelihoods of significant numbers of workers and their families. This was a simple task under the centrally controlled economy, when large subsidies were always available when necessary, and certain data were never released to the public. This made it easier to keep the population where needed at low overhead and little need to invest in environmental conservation and restoration. At the same time, with a more open society, awareness about health risks may further increase the emigration from the region. Such uncontrolled emigrationhas already started in the Imandra area during the economic meltdown period (Voinov etal., 2004a) . At present it has been almost stopped and industrial production is starting to grow again. However there is still very little concern among the population about ecosystem health and the connections to the human health. In many cases we are dealing with a population living in cities monopolized by the industry. The easiest way for the enterprises to avoid sufficient investment in environmental restoration is to relate these investments with the salaries that people are paid. People would rather live in polluted areas than take cuts in their paychecks, especially as long as the alternatives for migrants are few or none. Therefore it may be wishful thinking to assume that market economy will help solve these questions. Most of the production in the watershed is still very labor intensive and from the market stand point it is cheaper to keep the poorly informed population in place, rather than invest in new technology and deal with social problems associated with emigration. From the strictly ecological viewpoint one may assume that keeping the population in place may be beneficial for the environment, because certain probably still sufficiently high standards of environmental control are more likely to stay in place to make sure that the population can still live in these areas. Switching to temporary rotating work shifts may only result in further degradation of ecological conditions, if the economic profits only are to be maximized. On the other hand the impact of the human settlements, the city infrastructure, including transportation, heating, etc. — is only adding to the loads that the ecosystems need to sustain. In the short term we could easily design control measures that would at least protect human health. One obvious solution is to switch to underground, still unpolluted water supplies in cities. Fishing advisories and information on toxicity of fish may reduce consump­ tion of Lake fish. Apparently the younger generation is less involved in fishing, which remains a favorite hobby of the older people. However these measures will still require investment, and will not solve the problem of air pollution and decaying ecosystem health. In the long term mass exodus (or rather slow die-off due to non-replacement) of people living in the Kola North is very likely, especially taking into account the projections for skyrocketing fuel prices and climate change that may actually make it colder in the Kola. At this time in most cases it is only the lack of opportunity (jobs, housing) in the South that forces people to stick to their current job in the Imandra watershed cities. Ideally, we could easily envision a system that would dictate limits on loading (dose) based on monitoring the state of human and ecosystem health (effect). As shown above all the necessary components of such a system are already in place and it would not be a problem to tie them together with some modeling tools such as other existing models used to predict and understand watershed dynamics (e.g., Voinov et al., 1999, 2004b; Voinov and Costanza, 1999) . However so far we do not see any demand for such management system and it is not clear how to implement the recommendations that a system like this would generate. Perhaps we need to wait until the economic transition will settle down to a new quasi-steady state condition, in which the new governing mechanisms and drivers will start operating. Acknowledgments The workwas supported by grants from the NSF Office of Polar Programs OPP 0095196, 0354298, and Russian Fund for Fundamental Investigation (Grant 04-05-64523). References Adam SM, Ryon MGA. Comparison of health assessment approaches for evaluating the effects of contaminant-related stress on fish populations. J Aquat Ecosyst Health 1994;3:15-25.