Lukoil-Saratov gained access to the federal reserve in 1996 when it signed a contract with the Saratov regional administration. Lukoil-Saratov believes that their operations would actually help scientific study of the bird by providing needed funding. As part of Moscow's housing reform plan, the city government plans to raise prices of municipal services such as power and heat, officials announced in early April. One long-term project involves the installation of power meters in every apartment in the city to get residents used to tracking their own energy usage. City officials in St. Petersburg, Russia say that they will remove all unauthorized waste dumps from the city by the end of this year.
Details remain unclear on how the city intends to finance the removals.
March 1998 Russia and the G-7 group of industrialized nations plan cooperative efforts to crack down on international environmental crimes, according to US government officials. Discussions of how existing international law enforcement agencies can help this process will continue at a meeting of G-7 and Russian environmental ministers in April. Though the details of how joint implementation would work under the protocol are not yet clear, a number of such projects have been under study or in preliminary stages since the original Rio climate change treaty in 1992. Relatively inexpensive investments in technology for electricity producers and city heat plants can dramatically improve efficiency and cut emissions of gases like carbon dioxide which are covered by the treaty. Since the treaty's baseline for measuring reductions is 1990, at the beginning of the transition period, economic recession has left the east European nations far under their target levels with credits they may be able to sell.