Waterway E40 is a planned navigable transport route that aims to connect the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea.
The length is approximately 2000 km. According to the project, the route runs from the city of Gdansk in Poland through the territory of the Republic of Belarus and to the city of Kherson in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian part of the E40 waterway will follow the riverbed of the Pripyat River through the Chernobyl exclusion zone and the river Dnieper to the city of Kherson and exit to the Black Sea. The total area of the regions through which the E40 is to pass is about , with a population of 28,690,834.
Officially, the planning of the E40 waterway is still at an early stage, but in Ukraine, strategic documents are already being prepared and individual project parts are being implemented. In particular, in 2020, the Pripyat River was dredged within the exclusion zone.
The implementation of the E40 project has attracted considerable criticism from international and local public organizations in all three countries, as well as experts in the biological and environmental fields. The international campaign "STOP E40" against the implementation of the waterway project has been created".
According to experts of scientific institutions of the Republic of Belarus, the construction of the waterway will have a significant negative impact on the natural and cultural heritage of Polesia, on the well-being of the population of Polesia (1), as well as on the global carbon balance, hydrological and radiation situations, economy, transport development. There are alternative scenarios for the construction of the E40 for the development of Polesia and transport links between Ukraine, Poland and Belarus. First of all, it is about the reorientation of the Polesia region to the ecotourism industry. This was confirmed by a study conducted by Aivar Ruukel, a member of the board of the Global Ecotourism Network and a tour operator in the Soomaa National Park, Estonia.
The press has repeatedly stated that the E40 waterway is a restoration of an ancient transport route "from Varangians to the Greeks",
The story of the project
In 1996 in Geneva European Agreement on Main Inland Waterways of International Importance (AGN). Geneva, 19 January 1996 was signed. This list also includes E40 ("Е" is a category of Inland waterway of international significance. The numbers 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50, which grow from west to east, are assigned to the main roads, mostly north-south, that connect one sea basin to another).
The map of the E40 path first appeared in a document (white paper) United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) "White Paper on the progress, accomplishment and future of sustainable inland water transport" and was published separately on the resources of the UNECE.
In the early 2010s, a Polish-Belarusian-Ukrainian business consortium was created, which from Ukraine included not the central state bodies responsible for transport or the environment, but the Volyn Regional Water Resources Management and the NGO "Volyn Association of Scientists and Innovators". Although the project route will not pass through the territory Volyn region, it depends on the water resources of this area and will affect the local hydrological situation. Also, the invitation of participants from this area is explained by the intention to receive financial support under the Program of Cross-border Cooperation Poland-Belarus-Ukraine, funded by the European Union. On December 1, 2013, the project "Restoration of the main waterway E-40 on the Dnieper-Vistula section from strategy to planning"(2007-2015) was launched with a budget of more than 0.9 million euros. The EU funds amounted to € 821,281, the participants ' own funds - €91376. This money was spent mainly on the preliminary assessment (feasibility study) of the project and lobbying for the project. In 2015, a preliminary feasibility study of the project was published. According to this preliminary assessment, the route will pass through river systems of rivers Vistula , Zakhodni Bugа, Pina, Pripyat and Dnieper. As a result of the project, the riverbeds of these rivers will be changed: straightened / supported by dam/ deepened / widened or drained.
Although some sections of the ship's course already exist, the scale of the proposed new development is so global that, according to experts, an environmental disaster in the region is highly possible.
Today, international and European financial institutions have not agreed financing the E40, because they have quite strict requirements for the environmental friendliness of the projects they support.