Background

By the end of the 1980s a great tide of socio-economic and political change had taken hold of both Europe and Russia, opening new possibilities to attend to cultural, socio-economic and nature protection issues facing the future of the Gulf of Finland environment.

On approximately the same lattitude as the Bering Sea, Hudson Bay and Labrador Sea, the Gulf of Finland forms one of the seven natural sub- regions of the Baltic Sea. The Gulf is fed by rivers flowing from a huge land area which includes a large part of north-west Russia, eastern Finland and northern Estonia. The Gulf of Finland forms a long, shallow, estuarine basin about 420 km long and 48 to 135 km wide. The area of the Gulf is divided quite evenly by the territorial borders of Finland, Russia and Estonia. The coastal population, between 8 to 10 million people, is concentrated in three large cities - St. Petersburg (4 746 150), Helsinki (546 320) and Tallinn (411 600) - and in 24 towns with over 10 000 inhabitants. Around the coast there are four main language groups: Swedish, Finnish, Russian and Estonian.

Many decades of wasteful and negligent human activity had turned the estuarine ecosystem of the Gulf of Finland into the most polluted sub- region of the heavily polluted Baltic Sea.

In Finland in April 1991 a meeting of representatives from 12 environmental, educational, cultural and municipal organisations in the Helsinki area decided to form an ad hoc working group to investigate possibilities to establish a Finnish-Russian-Estonian, non-governmental, environmental trust-fund to support ecological activities around the Gulf of Finland. In November 1991 the working group decided that a legally constituted interim body was required to manage the process. The Gulf of Finland Environment Society (SULA) was registered in Helsinki in December 1992 with the following statutory objectives:

"To draw attention to the Gulf of Finland's environmental problems and to search for their solutions together with the coastal population. To realise these objectives the society will collect and publish information about the Gulf of Finland's coastal cultures and changes in the marine environment, and organise educational courses, cultural happenings and exhibitions."

SULA works from an office on the old island fortress of Suomenlinna outside Helsinki, a Unesco-recognised World Heritage Site.