Gardens and parks
Gardens and parks of St. Petersburg make up part of the green spaces of the city.
Green spaces of St. Petersburg and the suburbs together with the water surface occupy about 40 % of the city territory (according to 2002 data).
By 2000, there were about 65 m2 of plantings per 1 resident of the city. The total area of green spaces exceeds 31 thousand hectares, including 68 parks,
166 gardens, 730 squares, 232 boulevards, 750 green streets. The city's parks are located in various landscape conditions: on the lower and upper
terraces of the Gulf of Finland coast< (Strelna, Peterhof and Lomonosov parks), moraine plain (Pushkin city parks), Kama hills
(Shuvalovsky Park, aspen Grove).
The basis of a number of parks are natural forests that still retain their rock composition (Sosnovka, Specific Park).
Many parks created in the post-war years are divided into areas where woody vegetation was virtually absent (Moscow Victory Park, Primorsky Victory Park).
On the outskirts of the city, there are still woodlands left over from the subzone of the southern taiga: Yuntolovskaya forest dacha, Rzhevsky forest Park ,
forest Islands along the Okhta river, the Tallinn highway, between the Neva river and the railway to Moscow .
Environmental problem
According to the Ministry of natural resources and ecology of the Russian Federation, St. Petersburg took the second place in the
environmental rating of major Russian cities in 2011. There are 21 automatic air monitoring stations in the city. Emissions
to the atmosphere in 2009 amounted to 625.3 thousand tons. The number of emissions of harmful substances per capita is 135.9 kg
per year, per unit area of 434.5 tons per km2. 91.9% of all emissions are generated by transport. In 2009, compared to the previous
year, the number of emissions increased by 1% in transport, from stationary sources by 9.8 %.
The ecological state of the Neva river, the Neva Bay and the Gulf of Finland is unsatisfactory. Within the city limits, Neva is
polluted by industrial effluents, hundreds of industrial enterprises drain waste into it. Oil products are actively transported along the Neva
river. More than 80 thousand tons of pollutants enter the river every year. Every year, the St. Petersburg Committee for nature
management records on average more than 40 oil spills in the Neva water area. In 2013, the Rospotrebnadzor of St. Petersburg
recognized only one of the 24 beaches in the city as suitable for swimming. In 2009, the city generated 8 million m3 of solid
waste. Industry is a source of various waste products, much of which is a serious threat to the environment. Waste of classes
I—III was transported to the Krasny Bor landfill (30 km South of the city in the Tosnensky district of the Leningrad region) for
disposal of toxic waste, products of chemical, medical, and industrial enterprises until 2014.
In connection with the commissioning of structures to protect St. Petersburg from floods, the water exchange of the Neva Bay
with the Eastern part of the Gulf of Finland decreased by 10-20%, which gave an additional contribution to the increase in the
concentration of biogens in the Neva Bay. The poor choice of discharge sites of the Northern and South-Western treatment facilities
and high soil contamination in some areas of the Neva Bay contribute to the overall situation. The concern began the gradual
eutrophication of the shallow parts of the Gulf of Finland between the city and the dam and the consequent rotting remains of plants,
which may eventually lead to further eutrophication of the reservoir and expelling them from the waters of the vast areas of the Neva Bay,
moreover, in soils which will be buried a significant amount of harmful compounds.
