Hello. Can you please introduce yourself? My name is Alla, I come from the Ukraine, and my hobbies as well as my work are concerned with environmental protection in my region in the Ukraine, but also on the European level. But I also have some other hobbies. Which ones? I like to design and make clothes and to bake some sweets and to eat them afterwards (laughs). I made, for example, the clothes I am wearing right now. What motivated you to engage in the environmental movement in Ukraine? I grew up in love with nature, because my parents brought me out there since I was a little child. And they never let me break any branch or to cut any flower….they showed me to respect nature. I grew up in a Ukrainian Tradition, where we have a lot of nice songs about plants, which compare to us people. So I came to love nature. But now I live in a big industrial city and it annoys me to see that the leaves of the city trees turn yellow already in summer because of the acid rain and pollution. That is why I decided to do something to change the situation. Since how many years you are an activist for the environmental movement? I have been working for my NGO for seven years, but I started studying environmental issues since I was 17. Could you tell us about the environmental situation in your country? Especially, what problems do the environment and people face? It is different from region to region, because the Ukraine is quite large. The eastern part of the country mainly suffers from industrial pollution, as we have many fossil resources there: coal, oil and mining industry. Plus we have many enterprises in the heavy and chemical industries, of which some are inherited already from the 19th century. This leads to one of our biggest environmental problems: Air pollution. Furthermore we have huge dumps of industrial waste near the mines… We also have problems in the rural areas, as in my region around 80 percent of the land is cultivated for agriculture. But this is not done sustainably. When people hear about the Ukraine, the nuclear accident of Chernobyl often comes to their minds. Is this environmental nightmare still present today? Actually, Ukraine didn’t suffer too much from this accident, because the wind blew the nuclear fallouts to the directions of Belarus and Russia. So in Ukraine it is mainly around this plant. You only get a glimpse of this, because children get extradoses of iodine for meidcation to avoid adverse health effects due to increased radioactivity. I think, that was a valuable lesson, that we should not build any nuclear power plants in the Ukraine in the future. We still have 5 nuclear power plants with rather old technology running at the moment, but the government has recently released an Energy Strategy paper, which recommends even to increase nuclear power. Instead they should focus more on renewable energy like wind and solar power. Do you also focus on energy issues in your work for the Youth organization MELP? Not so much! We had a campaign together with YEE on renewable energy sources, but we mostly only promote and translate the materials. And we published information on what could be alternatives to nuclear energy, but this was a special campaign. Besides that, we have some successful projects. Personally I coordinate a program on regional strategies for sustainable development. Here we facilitate to bring different stakeholders from the region together representing business organisations, government and NGOs and together we develop strategies for sustainable development, action plans and indicators. And then we try to solve particular problems within the frame of our strategy; for example by finding out how to finance recreation zones near the city. As people in these industrial areas enjoy nature as contrast to their urban lives, these recreation zones provide an improvement of livelihood and contribute to nature conservation at the same time. That is sustainable development. Another success of these sustainability strategies was that we were able to improve the urban water system. Clean water is still a problem today, as industrial plants often have leaking sewage, which poison the environment and the drinking water. So here we made a major improvement to provide cleaner water. Could you recommend something to young people, which might be interested in the environmental movement, but are afraid of too many problems and too little support? It is true, not many people are working for environmental protection and this makes it sometimes quite challenging. That is why many young people at my age start to work in the movement but drop out again soon. The main point is: If you feel that something is wrong with our environment, just do something against it. Because by just sitting and waiting, the problem won’t go away. Thanks for the interview.