Russia's largest mining and metallurgical company Norilsk Nickel plans to eliminate up to 95% of sulfur dioxide emissions in the industrial area by 2025 as part of a new environmental strategy, said the company's vice president Dmitry Pristanskov.

"This summer we adopted a new environmental strategy with a large amount of investment - for 10 years on average more than 680 billion rubles. <...> One of the key ones is the Sulphur Program 2.0. <...> This is an ongoing programme and by 2025 more than 95% of the sulphur dioxide emitted in the Norilsk industrial district will be completely eliminated. We have already gone away in the Kola Peninsula. This program for radical reduction of sulphur dioxide emissions, I think, has no analogues in the world," Pristanskov said during the Eastern Economic Forum - 2021.

In addition to the Sulfur Program 2.0, the company has developed a climate change strategy and is launching an independent environmental impact assessment program, he said.

"The precedent we encountered in May 2020 served as a definite driver to implement measures to eliminate the consequences of recent environmental incidents and develop a certain map for the future. We have taken up the issues of electrification of transport, development of renewable energy sources, hydrogen energy," the company's vice president added.

He reminded that following the environmental incident, Nornickel reorganized its governance structure and formed a new Risk Committee, which was chaired by the company's CEO Vladimir Potanin.

At the end of May 2020, an accident occurred at CHPP-30, owned by Nornickel's subsidiary NTEK, resulting in over 20 thousand tons of diesel fuel spilled into the waters of the Norilo-Pyasinskaya lake and river system. Rosrybolovstvo estimated the damage to the water area at almost 60 billion rubles. In February 2021, a court ordered Nornickel to pay 146 billion rubles in damages to the environment.