Moscow has not done enough to mitigate environmental damage resulting from construction work for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, the United Nations has said. And the World Wildlife Fund agrees that more needs to be done to protect Russia's ecosystem.

The UN Environment Programme dispatched a team to Sochi to examine the environmental cost of the next Winter Olympics. The team made a number of key findings that call into question the government's commitment to protecting the environment in the area. The UN says that at a political level, decision-making takes far too long.

But more importantly the UN team found that the various stakeholders, including several environment NGOs and the project developers, are reluctant to engage with each other. On one hand, the NGOs feel their complaints are being ignored by the construction companies and the government. On the other hand, the developers believe the environmentalists are using stalling tactics in a bid to disrupt the Olympic project.

Recomendations
The UN report makes a number of recommendations on how the Russian government can improve the situation, including making an assessment of the overall impact of the project and starting an environmental monitoring programme.

The Russian division of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) believes the UN report confirms their longstanding complaint that the Sochi Olympics is jeopardising the country's wildlife. WWF Russia director Dr Igor Chestin says the construction projects have been hastily put together:

"The major problems that came out in the past couple of years is that, because of the time rush, the project designs were done without the baseline surveys. Therefore the projects cannot mitigate the damage because the potential damage was simply not properly identified."

Government resistance
The WWF has accused Russian authorities of damaging the ecosystem, a criticism that the Kremlin has brushed off. Over the weekend, games coordinator Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak, blasted environmental organisations for adopting what he calls an unconstructive position. But Dr Chestin believes the government is ignoring the importantance of this region of the country: 

"The mountain cluster of the Olympics is the richest area, in terms of biodiversity, in the whole country. There are more species of plants and animals there than anywhere else in Russia... We have the extermination of endangered tree species like the box tree and the Wingnut. However there is also unestimated damage, which almost for sure occurred for animals like the brown bear, the red deer... [and] the wild boar."

The United Nations has offered to host a series of discussion events in the hopes of stimulating communication between the stakeholders, but more than mere talk will be needed to protect the wildlife threatened by the Sochi Olympic Games.